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

On 9/10/06, Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:

One problem with almost all social software is that it makes two false assumptions: (a) It assumes that relationships are dichotomous: Friend/Non-Friend.

Or that it is unidimensional. Tribe.net, I believe, orkut, and others have tried to provide a bit more nuance here, at the encouragement of the community. But adding gradations isn't enough. "Friend" in the social networking systems parlance really covers a range of personal relationships. Note that Flickr allows you to put people into a few different groups. * "contact" * "friend" * "family" I suspect that most systems consider "friend" to be "contact." I also suspect that most people do not define "friends" the same way their software does, though there is almost certainly "leakage" in terminology. And, frankly, I think that these kinds of issues are leading to everyday elaboration of such gradations (viz BFFL, friends with benefits, and other neologisms). What I find most interesting about the Flickr case is that you can mark photographs appropriate for "friends" or "family" or both. Just because I want my friends to see a photo doesn't mean that I want my Mom to. To which the natural answer is "duh!" But many systems that allow for gradations in "friendliness" assume that you want to reveal the most to your closest friends/family, when that may not be the case at all. Spring break in Mexico is not for Moms, and in many cases is not for SOs or even close friends.

(b) It assumes that friends all belong to the same group.

It certainly seems to clump them together that way. But I would argue that many social networking systems have at least the implicit objective (inasmuch as they seem to have an objective at all), of performing the function of linking up your network of friends. Systems like LinkedIn, especially, seem to be keyed directly to making introductions within your network, but that is a major function of most of these systems. I've suggested elsewhere that these systems (blogs too) are moving us *away* from networked sociability as they tend to aggregate our relationships in a way that feels much more like a constrained physical/geographical community. My "contacts" at work, and in my home town, and in my hobby club, and at school are now much more likely to know each other through my blog or through my social networking system than they would have been a few years ago. - Alex -- // // This email is // [X] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais // Social Architect // http://alex.halavais.net //