I moved out of India few years ago and now live in Taiwan. Most of my best friends are in India but few are in US. I have tried all sorts of things personal blog, posterous group blog,google group,google site and other social networks such as Facebook and Orkut but finally we have settled on exchanging emails as the only way to keep in touch. I think it is perfectly normal. Some of us were bothered by having to to leave their inboxes and go to some other website just to check on our group messages and also email provided sort of privacy we were all comfortable with. Almost all of us use gmail for the threaded conversations (gmail) which are great for these sort of emails (photos/events/outing reports)