I've also been thinking about the meanings of 'friend' in social networking contexts and appreciate danah's and Barry's insights into the issue. To return to last.fm, one of the changes they introduced over the summer was going from a system where you could 'friend' someone without their 'friending' you to a system where friending had to be mutual. Some derided this as the further MySpacification of last.fm, but, to my surprise, most seemed not to care. Aside from the lack of reaction from last.fm users, what I thought was interesting was: (1) the ability of developers to make a unilateral decision about what 'friendship' should mean after another system had already been in place for some time. This gets back to the questions raised by forming social networks in proprietary spaces. (2) the social network information lost to the community as a whole when friendships must be mutual. For instance, it is no longer possible to see that People X, Y and Z all think Person J is a great source of new music tips unless Person J has accepted all of their friendship requests, so if J is a much-admired discerner of good music that provides stickiness for the site yet does not want to collect friends, the information about J's value is lost where before it was visible. This seems to work against the site's best interests. They are now working on a bookmarking feature to replace one-way friendship, but it is not clear if those bookmarks will be visible to others, let alone aggregated in any way to figure out who are the stickiest people. While many social networking sites seem to operate just fine with only allowing mutual friending, I would think it would be better for site stickiness to discern the kinds of links that danah notes 'friendships' may actually represent and build in ways to make that information visible rather than narrowing an already vague category into something more restrictive and no definitionally clearer. As Barry notes, there are many kinds of valuable interpersonal connection, and one term does not begin to do them justice. Putting together my syllabus for a course in Communication Technologies and Personal Relationships this semester, I was surprised to see little if any published research taking on the question of what people mean when they label someone a 'friend' on a social networking site or the concerns that label raises for people (for instance, one objection to the Facebook minifeed was that if one were 'defriended' it would be visible to all as public rejection, while for the defriender, rejection may have had nothing to do with it). If anyone is aware of research into this, I would appreciate references. Nancy