When people are friendly but insanely distant...

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The quiet and introverted types aren't the people you should be worried about.

well perhaps you should have specified that in your initial post.

I believe that you are talking about some snobbish types that are capable of making a show of being friendly to everyone in a way that still suggests that they are too important to be truly associated with you (or with other "unimportant people").

If so, I think they are trying to preserve their perceived high social status by being choosy.

When I first read the title, I thought I had seen somebody describing something that I experienced a lot but never had words for (this happens every once in a while), but it doesn't look like that's actually the case. What I thought you meant was people who spend lots of time together and are nice to each other, but don't understand each other and are not really emotionally close, and in a way where they would be friends if the could, but are just incompatible. I don't think it means anybody is bad, it just means that they don't understand each other. This is how most of my interactions are. I think this is the closest thing to having a friend that I got for most of my life: somebody who cares about me and goes through the motions of being a friend, but does not understand me, and knows it. I appreciate these people, although it makes me sad. Of course there are other people who really aren't interested in being friends and are just nice out of politeness, and that is also okay.

i don't like talking to people first.

Yes, yes, this is basically me; afraid of people. I would definitely say that I come off as being friendly-yet-distant.

That's how I understood it when I read your OP. Because I'm painfully aware of the phenomenon, I knew exactly what you meant. I didn't post because I don't have much to say about it. It's just another of the zillions ways in which we're rejected, that's all. Of course I can't trust people who have something serious against me, even if just my neurology, so I don't trust them.

Not usually. Mostly they are just extroverts. Extroverts have many, many friends, but they don't like to sit there and philosophize about what they believe and what they feel. They just want to get out there and do stuff. Extroverts are not particularly sensitive to their environments, and so it takes a lot of input to make them feel comfortable--a crowd, a roller coaster, a basketball game; eating lunch with twelve people instead of one, inviting everybody you know for your birthday, going to a club instead of a museum. Instead of carefully looking over small details, extroverts like to be flooded with a lot of stuff all at once--and a lot of people. They are a part of a group, a part of a crowd, and that's where they feel at home. It seems strange and foreign to me, but there are more ways of living than mine, and if it works for them, that's okay by me.