"i am lonely will anyone speak to me" was the title of a thread that was posted on the Internet forum of the video codec downloads site Moviecodec.com, and had become "the web's top hangout for lonely folk".^[1][2] The thread began July 14, 2004; it was the first hit when the phrase "I am lonely" was entered into the Google search engine, though it has since dropped.

It was featured in the magazines Wired,^[2] Guardian Unlimited,^[3] and The New Yorker.^[4] Bjarne Lundgren, the webmaster of Moviecodec.com, has stated "Like-minded people tend to flock together and, in this case, Google helped in flocking them together on my site".^[2]

Mark Griffiths, a researcher in internet psychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, also addressed this question, stating: "There are a lot of lonely people out there. Some people rely heavily on technology and end up treating it as an electronic friend, a sounding board—just writing it down can make you feel better... That doesn't change their psychological world at that moment, but creating a kinship with like-minded people can help. You're all in this virtual space together."^[2]

Due to its large community, Bjarne created a new forum entitled "A Lonely Life",^[5] for the thread's numerous lonely inhabitants to move to. The original thread was later moved to Moviecodec.com's branch site, The Lounge Forums,^[6] but as of December 24, 2016, the website the thread is hosted on was shut down and can no longer be accessed.

• Loneliness