(recovered post)
There is a very interesting discussion on the concept of Web 2.0 “friends†over at Meredith Farkas’ blog, Information Wants To Be Free – Couldn’t have said it better…. Meredith’s posting starts off a great discussion in the comments about how different people view friendship in the Web 2.0 world. One comment pointed out a cute strip from Unshelved – the library comic strip – that highlights the different ways in which people perceive friends on social networking sites. The consensus, from the comments on this particular post at least, seems to be that Flickr (with it’s “contactâ€, “friendâ€, “family†levels of acknowledgment) seems to be the best way to handle friendships in these social sites.
My personal philosophy differs depending on the site. I’m pretty much a friend whore on my personal MySpace page. If it’s not an obvious ad or spam, I’ll add you. I’m more selective about my Twitter friends, simply because more friends means more tweets to keep up with. I add anyone who asks on my Ning networks, but then I don’t actually use those very often, so it’s not a big deal for me to do that there!
