Occasionally, I’ll friend people I don’t know and have no relationship with at all. Mainly it’s because they seem like people I’d like to get to know at some point. Most of the time, I reject friend requests if I don’t know the person, and I feel no guilt about it whatsoever.

I’ve used LiveJournal since I was in college, for about 5 years now, and this has been an everpresent question in that circle. What does it mean if you don’t friend someone, if you decided you don’t want that person friended anymore and defriend them. It has caused far more drama than it should.

While I’m not a bit fan of SixApart (the company that bought out LiveJournal), one of the things they did right with Vox – their new social networking/blogging platform, was making connecting/friending/privacy options very transparent. There are three levels, family, friends, & neighbourhood. Consequently, I add everyone who adds me to my neighbourhood, add only people I know fairly well to my friends, and have a family level for people who I’m really close to. Posts, photos, anything you upload can be designated viewable only to that group, and you can easily read any of those groups making the sorting through posts obsolete.

LiveJournal allows the same sort of thing, albeit a bit more clunkily, with friends filters.

With FaceBook, MySpace, Flicrk, etc, I tend to add only people I know, or I choose to allow them a limited profile as opposed to a full profile. Even with LiveJournal, I add only those people whose posts I’m interested in reading as otherwise I’m wading through a lot of extraneous posts. I no longer feel badly about this practice and often in my profile I state up front what my ‘friending’ policy is. So far I’ve avoided any drama on the topic!

MySpace Outage Leaves Millions Friendless:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/myspace_outage_leaves_millions

I keep thinking about like-mindedness. I’ve stopped blogging, because updating became a chore not an exercise or a pleasure. But I have found a number of like-minded folks out there in the biblioblogosphere (where I don’t pull my weight), and and friending through SN feels like it might be a way to make the acquaintance… which raises the question of ‘meeting new friends’ in SN space…

see, if i kept up my blog, I could have posted this comment there, and elaborated. and then people would follow the trackback to read me and want to befriend me on Twitter and Facebook and…..

I like the feature in facebook that allows you to fine tune what updates you get to see of your friends – i.e. since Facebook doesn’t show you absolutely every update that happens in your friends’ groups, you can set your preferences so that you see more status updates and less group joinings, for example. I haven’t tried it myself, but I believe that you can fine tune it so that updates from certain people are shown more than from others. The nice thing about the Facebook feature is that others don’t get to see if you’ve adjusted their settings, so you don’t have to worry about offending anyone.

It would be beneficial if other social networking applications had similar features, so that you could still establish a network of contacts, yet also use the applications to keep up on your closer friends without being flooded with updates.

I had a problem with people adding me as a friend when I started out using these systems, but to be honest I don’t really care now. I’ve done a mental global delete with ‘friend’ and replaced with ‘potential contact’ and that works much better for me. I have no problem with the idea that someone might want to stay in touch, to read what I write and so on, because I’m doing the exact self same thing when I read their weblogs- but that doesn’t make me their friend or them mine, but as a contact – yes, they’re exactly that.

Once you can make that leap the whole thing becomes easier to deal with. Ideally I’d like a Flickr type solution where I can have contacts, friends and family, all with different levels of accessibility, which much more closely relates to a real life situation.

It’s interesting that a number of you have mentioned being very open with friendings in Ning/Library 2.0! I friended and affirmed requests from anyone whom I knew IRL, had networked with, read their blog, met in Second Life, etc.. Yet even after that, it seemed everyone in the network was requesting friendship, which seemed redundant. Having said this out loud, I now need to be honest and go reject all those lingering friend requests so they stop haunting me when I log in.

Twitter is one where it is disappointing when the contact/friend-ing isn’t reciprocated. I’ve found myself starting to reply to people who haven’t reciprocated my contact, then realizing they won’t read it anyway, so what’s the point? Still, I thought I’d have closed my postings to friends only by now, but I’ve been friended by some people whose twittering I enjoy and I wouldn’t have known of otherwise, so I’m still open.

I guess it’s about customising your “online communities”, and having different levels of acquaintance. Yes, it’s still a case of categorising people according to how well you’re acquainted, but I think that’s okay. It’s not like you’re inviting them over to your house for dinner.