Penpals have for decades been the primary way the people around the world have found new people in distant places to converse with by letter. It has always been a mainstay of education systems when teaching school children new languages. Over the last few years we have seen dramatic changes in its scope and commercial impact with the advent of countless penpal related websites.

With the advent of the Internet it became kind of confusing for people as to whether or not they should still refer to people who they email as a penpal, obviously the word penpal implies the use of writing. In 1998 two school kids Fabian K'hler and Michal Gabrukiewicz started the first on-line penpal site and called it mailfriends.com which still held the original reference to the use of mail and the creation of international friendships. This has gone on to become one of the most active communities on the web with countless sites now adopting the term mailfriend and using it interchangeably with penpal to describe an on-line penpal.

What is even more interesting is the crossover that has occurred between Penpal, Dating, Social Networking, forums and community web sites. All are essentially merging into very similar types of sites with almost identical features and the only real difference been the way in which they choose to be associated with different demographics.

If you search for penpals on Google, check out the advertisements on the side, they are all mostly for dating sites, if you go to a penpal site that runs adsense or any of the other advertising networks, 8 times out of 10 you will see adverts for dating sites.

A search of penpals on google.com will return over 3,500,000 results and mailfriends will return countless sites with both mailfriends and penpals in the title as well as assorted other terms like e-mailfriend, epal.

One thing is for certain this is a major growth area that cannot be ignored with domain names for both penpal and mailfriend domain names fetching thousands of dollars on domain auction sites. Lets hope that this does not push out the original concepts and genuine desire for people around the world to get to know each other in a friendly and platonic manner learn about each others cultures, language and societies.