Are You My Friend Friend?

Social networking has altered the way that some of the more connected among us look at the concept of “friendship.”

If you are someone like Robert Scoble and have a stable of thousands of friends to contend with, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to ask the question what does friendship of this sort really mean.

There seem to be three major tiers of Friendship using this model. They go something like this.

Friend Friend

These are people who you have some real connection to. Whether they are old acquaintances who you are staying in touch with online or people at the periphery of your social circle that you want to keep track of. Friend Friends are the type of people who it wouldn’t seem strange to call up on the phone, and for normal users, these make up the majority of the friends in their network.

Professional Contact

These are people you might not know personally, but you know of them. Web marketers make great use of this kind of Friendship. These are people who, for whatever reason, you want to keep tabs, or often times people who are inaccessible except through a social network. Usually, this sort of “friendship” is a strange combination of voyeurism and one-sided debate. That being said, it’s not a terrible way to get to know people you may not have a more logical means of getting into contact with.

Hangers On

These are not your friends in any traditional sense, however, you have no qualms with allowing them to “think” they are. Generally, the percentage of hangers on increase exponentially with the number of friends you have in a network beyond the low hundreds. These are friendships where you have no real personal contact, no intention of ever having a personal contact nor are you completely aware that these people are actually your friends. In a way, hangers on have just become RSS feed subscribers to your lifestream.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I don’t believe social networks have created these distinctions, instead they have made them a lot more apparent. Celebrities, sports stars and politicians have aggregated their relationships in similar ways for years. However, blogging has given otherwise “normal” people a platform to work these layers of relationships into their lives. What are your thoughts?

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