I think of everyone as a “Ph”riend. That’s so much cooler, eh? Like how the cool kids call things “Phat!”

Cheers,
Dave

The distinctions you and the above commenters make about various online forms of “friendship” are good ones.

Take a look at XFN (the XHTML Friends network), a simple way of expressing a variety of forms of friendship (like friend, acquaintance, contact) on any of your pages on the web with hyperlinks, which was developed, to reflect perhaps the 80% (certainly not all, deliberately, to keep it simple) of common real world online friendship references:

http://gmpg.org/xfn/

You can even express that you have “met” someone, or that they are a co-worker or just a colleague.

Blogging tools like WordPress even have built-in support for XFN in their blog rolls:

http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-implementations

Many social networks now support XFN as well, including Twitter, which reflects the “follow” relationship as a “contact”.

http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-xfn-friends-lists

Thanks,

Tantek

Typically, the front-page lure into these sites is, “Never mind what we’re about, or why we’re not just like the last thing you joined. Sign up now! Invite your friends!” Often I’ve replied to the silent monitor image, “If I had friends, I wouldn’t need you, now would I?” It’s like someone teaching me how to make my second million dollars.

What we call friends today we used to call mail-merge. The illusion of intimacy, the easy use of first names, the important inclusion of cultural likes and dislikes — but computer-generated. This is the LAST medium I’d ever choose to pour out my heart, as I can with a friend. I’d be too concerned about my Personal Brand, and want to avoid the “naked photo syndrome” that keeps bad news cached twice as long as good news. So it’s nothing but optimistic, Chapmanesque cheer from me. If I’m down, you’ll never know it, because I’ll be offline. (I’m even a bit self-conscious about posting this comment, since it sounds so negative.)

Friendship is as old as civilization. For the first 99% of the history of this human trait, it was done in person, with the friends grunting at each other and interacting in reality. But social media completely synthesizes the experience. We now type, and call it talking. We think we feel a presence to someone else, because our monitors are 18 inches from our faces. We have to resort to acronyms for laughter. We’ve constructed such a spindly tower of metaphor for this technology that I’m afraid that the denizens of Web 3.0 (if not 2.0) will never feel compelled to leave the house. But there remains a primordial brain lobe that will not be convinced you’re a friend, or even that you exist, until we meet. At that point — maybe — we can be friends. But not until. I’m feeling a social pressure to ignore that skeptical backbrain and embrace the metaphor. I can’t be the only holdout, can I?

Social media is not friendship. It’s the dirt from which friendships can grow (I hope!). It’s a place to bring existing friendships, for interim nourishment. But it’s essentially a patch of dirt.

But I think it’s reasonable to assume that some people who succeed in connecting to you online through a network think that they have more of a connection to you, and the strength of that connection is often not measured the same way on both sides of it. For some, the more connections they have to you through more networks, the stronger they believe their connection to be. But it takes more than simply adding someone as a friend to really have a true connection, and we all know this; it still takes communication and a sharing of ideas before you can even be close to becoming a friend.

Some people just add friends to increase their numbers, like a status. They want to appear more popular or more in tuned with the network, so they add indiscriminately, and it really is a case of quantity over quality.

Most people should know exactly where they stand with people – i.e. I’m a fan of Galacticast, but that doesn’t make me tight with Rudy even though I am his “friend” on Facebook. But like you alluded to, C.C., this whole idea of “who is my Friend vs friend?” is something we grow up molding in our own minds, so the issue is quite universal.

Until you meet someone you might be in thrall or in love with an idea of who they are, rather than the reality…

I also love that the conversations are jumping channels. Some people are commenting here, others are calling in and then check this out. So far two people giving their feedback via Seesimic:

http://www.seesmic.com/Standalone.html?video=PH9NFqiZSJ

and then…

http://www.seesmic.com/Standalone.html?video=1ONR5Id05C

I meet TONS of people and I love helping them all out no matter how close they are to me. But, each of us in our heads since the time we were little had our own ranking system or categories in our heads for when someone was a “best friend” or now I guess BFF would be the proper term. *grin*

Social media allows us to connect and build relationships with people in a way that we couldn’t do in the past and as we move forward borders will continue to fade away. It is an exciting time.

To Julien’s point, I don’t think that whether someone rates a capital “F” depends on your knowing them “in protein.” Stefan and I got engaged after 6 months of trading e-mails and one face-to-face meeting. But we all know people in various contexts whom we like but either can’t or don’t choose to develop close, continuous relationships with.

Utterz uses “Circle.” Twitter uses “Follow.” I think social app developers are starting to catch on that the term Friend doesn’t quite work.

And I’ve decided that Web 2.1 is where you end up using filtering and streamlining all the contacts and noise you’ve accumulated in Web 2.0.

Looking forward to more stream-of-consciousness podcasts. Torley had a good one the other day, and I’ve been experimenting with them on Utterz on Saturdays.

and secondly, on a stream of consciousness comment, which twitter lends itself to, i actually find those kind of pod-posts more, or certainly as, interesting as the more planned ones. keep it up.

H