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Friending
As many have observed over the years, when a noun becomes a verb (googling, skyping, aiming, etc), you know you are onto something big.
Over the past several years, the word friend has taken on verb attributes.
Friending someone on a social network has become an every day activity. Barely a family dinner goes by without one of my kids talking about friending somone or requesting a friend of someone. It's a big part of what they do online.
I first came across this friending thing on LinkedIn which I joined several years ago. I've probably recieved 300 to 400 requests to add someone to my LinkedIn network and I've accepted 122 of them. I've basically taken the approach that I only accept requests from people I know pretty well. That always made sense to me. I generally don't reject the rest. I just let them expire.
I've had a MySpace profile for about a year and have six friends, including Tom. I have used it mainly to understand what happens on MySpace and for some reason, even though I have linked to it several times on this blog, I've never gotten many friend requests. That's fine with me although my kids and Charlie have made fun of my lack of friends on numerous occasions.
Last week I linked to my new Facebook profile and have recieved over 50 friend requests since. I've accepted the people I know or think I know and am debating what to do with the rest. If they aren't friends, should I make them friends?
This is an important question in my mind. And last week's Facebook backlash points out why. As Fred Stutzman pointed out in a comment to my post on the topic:
Facebook is an interesting place. Users "friend" each other as a show of affection - its cultural currency on a college campus. As I've seen in my research, users average hundreds of friends - obviously more friends than anyone could juggle. Implicit in this mass "friendship" is that the bond is weak. More or less, people in the Facebook aren't checking all their "friends" profiles every day - nor do they care to.
Facebook has changed the cultural definition of friendship in the service. When people friended each other, all it meant was you were friends - not that the people you friend get to see everything you do in your life. Yes, people could stalk this information from you if they wanted - but there was safety in numbers, in the sense that this sort of stalking behavior wasn't the norm.
Friendship has been defined on most social networks as the people who get their faces on your profile. But as these social networks start to add real applications/utility on top of the relationship maps it's going to create issues. Friendship is not a monolithic thing. It's a nuanced thing.
It's time for some granularity in this friendship thing. Best friends, good friends, old friends, new friends, friends of friends, etc. The management of Facebook might even be thinking of adding this functionality now in order to quell the backlash around the "news feeds" they rolled out last week.
The thing is, I am not sure it's going to work from a social engineering perspective. Will people be comfortable rating their friendships online? That's going to cause some problems as this scene from the myspace movie shows.
Or you can fast forward to 6:48 in the player below:
Comments (9) | Posted September 10, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Uh, people have been befriending others for millennia. It's one of the things that makes us sociable animals. Has nary a thing to do with technology.
Posted by: Dave | Sep 10, 2006 8:50:59 PM
Such a great blog! Quite interesting to
me. As social beings we are actually
embibed with the ability to make friends
for survival.
Posted by: tyn2 | Sep 10, 2006 9:02:01 PM
Fred, you are right that there is a new trend going on here, and one that is both interesting and challenging. Due to the decreased friction associated with "making friends," there has been increased access to otherwise unreachable people. While you, and many who did not grow up with this technology, will be reticent to allow people into your circle, those who have grown up with it have a different definition of trust, and will allow random connections.
These random connections, coupled with the decreased friction, is great for many things, but one of the reasons why something like Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" is so successful at presenting the potential harms of the net. It used to be we only had to worry about a guy and a van in our neighborhood. Now we have to worry about a guy and a laptop anywhere in the world.
Look for this "friending" meme to heat up as parents start to understand this as a mechanism for access to children.
Posted by: Brandon Watson | Sep 10, 2006 9:04:43 PM
forget the post-the video was hilarious!
Posted by: Charlie Crystle | Sep 11, 2006 12:14:31 AM
Some sites, such as flickr, already have introduced some granularity to the concept of friending. There you can add someone as a "contact" which essentially means you have bookmarked them, or you can add them as a "friend" or "family", thereby granting access to your photos at different levels.
The definition of "friend" will vary based on the application of the social network. On the purely social sites such as myspace and friendster, it is quite loose. On sites with a more specific application such as LinkedIn or TripConnect, the "friendship" becomes goal specific: for LinkedIn it is people you would refer a job or business to. On TripConnect, it is people you want to exchange travel advice with.
The uproar over permissions at Facebook is a challenge that all sites with a social networking mechanism in place face. Some users want a more open network, some want more privacy. As the site manager, you want more networking to happen, but you also don't want people to feel they are getting unsolicited requests. The trick is to set the right default, and make users aware that they can change the defaults to suit their own preference.
Posted by: Carter Nicholas | Sep 11, 2006 9:40:05 AM
There's no need to have people publicly define the level of friend - we don't do that in real life. I might call Bob and Jim friends... but privately I think of Bob as a close friend and Jim as a good acquaintance and I treat them differently, but I don't publicly label them - they're both friends.
This is what Facebook should have done in response to the outcry - let people classify thier friends in a private view and have the type of information that shows in the feed vary by class. This isn't perfect ("Hey, why don't I see everything in your feed?") but it's closer to real life.
Oh and to Brandon's point... the new generation is going to learn that not all of these people are friends... the kid in Malaysia that friends you just isn't the same as the buddy you actaully hang out with on weekends. Treating them all the same will surface issues like the privacy and transparency issues Facebook is seeing now... Do you want a feed so that close friends can see what's happening in your life? Fine... but if you don't want that exposed to everyone, you need to differntiate from a casual friend and a close one.
Posted by: rick gregory | Sep 11, 2006 1:54:37 PM
An online friend through a social networking site (facebook, myspace) is quite different than a real life friend and they can’t really be compared. In the online world it makes sense to amass as many friends as possible. The more connections, the more you can do on the site.
Myspace and facebook allow young adults to act cool just like the blog world allows the more nerdier/tech-savvy crowd to act smart. This isn’t a knock, just a metaphor. My point being that a blogger hardly ever wants to limit the exposure of their blog. In fact most bloggers keep track of their feed subscriptions and users. It’s fun and exciting knowing that you can discover new people online and that new people are discovering you.
Ultimately, the kid on facebook or the blogger just want to have control of what others can view. Facebook took the control away from the user and this is what upset them. When I asked my little sister who is a senior at Duke about the changes she immediately said “TMI” – too much information. She no longer had control of what people could view. It would be like if every website you visited during the day appeared on your blog. All of a sudden, your creation isn’t sending the exact message that you want it to send.
Posted by: Brian | Sep 11, 2006 9:54:37 PM
no deep thoughts from me right now but that video was hysterical. Yeti- lol!
Posted by: Gordon Gould | Sep 13, 2006 2:45:58 AM
hello, i am a french girl writting a school essai about friending on the Internet.
I just want to thank you for all your opinions, that show the differences between teenagers and adults.
It was very interesting.
Thanks
Posted by: julie | Nov 26, 2006 6:12:49 AM
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