Alone on the Internet? Hardly

The cyberworld expands people’s social networks and even encourages people to talk by phone or meet others in person, a new study finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.

“There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”

He’s taking a novel approach

Tom Perkins secured a place in Silicon Valley lore long ago as the co-founder of a venture capital firm that financed revolutionary companies like Genentech Inc. and Google Inc.

For his next big breakthrough, Perkins hopes to rival his ex-wife, best-selling author Danielle Steel, as a romance novelist. His first book, “Sex and the Single Zillionaire,” was just published.

Perkins concedes it’s no masterpiece, but that hasn’t stopped him from dreaming about the book shooting to the top of the charts, just like so many of Steel’s have.

“If that happened, it would rank right up there with anything else I’ve done in my career,” the 73-year-old Perkins said during a recent interview.