What does "friend" mean, anyway?

Posted Sat Feb 09 22:10:34 -0800 2008

I just went through and friend-ed a bunch of folks I've met here...not that I mean to presume on limited acquaintance, so please don't take it as creepy. I've always felt that "friend" is a problematic term on social networks...if I want to follow someone's blog on livejournal, I have to make him/her my "friend", implying a level of trust I may not want to grant. On the other hand, people have been lamenting about the devalued notion of "friendship" in modern society for years, so maybe this is just the logical conclusion. Maybe in ten years everyone will be everyone else's "friend", and we'll be in some sort of happy semantic utopia. What do you think?


NJ,

Well, you definitely gave it some thought. However the truth is much less interesting. ... Basically, it's a quirk. The system is meant to only have friend or fan, but b/c of our deployment path we ended up with both. ... quirk.

-- dave

 

Some conferences request both friend and fan actually. We've tried making conference networks entirely about reaching out to new people (that's why we usually go with fan/want-to-meet) but many people have an overwhelming desire to collect all of their existing friends. We're going to try a version for Web 2.0 where we try to satisfy that urge as quickly as possible so people can get on to making new friends.

 

Well I "friended" people that I wanted to make sure I kept up with - and remember that I met them, especially if I didn't get a chance to get their business card (or they didn't have one). I had such a great time - but there were sooo many people - it's a bit hard to keep track of everyone - I was thankful I could "friend" them here.

 

For me I added as a "friend" those people I hope and expect to stay in touch with well after the conference. I agree that the level of emotional connection isn't the same as my college pals...yet...but by staying in touch it's possible that some or all of them will one day be on the Christmas card list.

And just because someone didn't get "friended" by me doesn't mean there isn't that same potential to stay in touch, just that the basis hasn't really evolved yet. Those people will stay on my "fan" and "want to meet" lists for a while, and hopefully some will become part of my ongoing professional network.