simple_graph.pngScoble revived the meme about how social networks hijack the term “friend.” At this point we all realize “Friending” someone on a social network has little to do with real-life friendships.

The act of “Friending” is just creating an edge between two nodes in the work. It’s a pair of values in a database… it’s very abstract when viewed so literally.

I really like danah boyd’s thorough investigation of this topic in a piece on First Monday called Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites. It takes an academic approach that really covers all the crucial elements of this topic.

danah is doing a new study on international social networks, and the #1 question she wants to answer is very important to this dicussion:

What do they call “Friends” (both natively and English-translation)?

I think the answer to that question will be very telling for determining what “friending” actually means in a social network.

Anyway, back to Scoble… Scoble’s feature request for describing “friending” is great:

Why can’t I add tags to each contact? Tags I pick. Not that are forced on me by some 22-year-old developer who has no idea about what a 42-year-old’s social network looks like.

I’d go even further and argue that a 22-year-old developer has no idea about the average 22-year-old’s social network structure. Everyone’s different. That’s part of the reason why I really liked MBLTagger when it first came out and later MBL’s new first-party tagging feature. Both of these services had Scoble’s feature request implemented before he even posted it today.

Social networking sites have gone so far in hijacking the term “friend” that the term now has a completely alternate definition. “Friend” still means “close acquaintance”, but now it also means “edge in a network of people nodes” and this new definition now has nothing to do with the original definition. Sure, the new definition grew out of the old, but it has now taken on an independent existence.