In Graves We Trust

Platforms like MySpace & Facebook could learn some lessons about “friending” from platforms like Flickr and Plaxo.  I’ve never really liked how platforms like MySpace and Facebook have only the default setting of “friend” available to assign your “contacts” to.  Back when I had a MySpace account—in the early days of the platform—I absolutely refused to add anyone that I wasn’t legitimately friends with.  This policy of mine caused quite a few problems, and people would get all pissed off about how I wouldn’t add them as a “friend” until we actually knew each other.  Often this was of no verifiable detriment to me, but maybe I missed a few connections along the way by being so aggro and defiant about the term “friend” as it was being used/abused by MySpace.

I took the term “friend” at face value, and never really agreed with how it was being watered down by MySpace & company.  I’ve always considered the word “friend” to be a very strong word only granted to those in my “inner circle”—people that I could call at 3a broken down on the side of the road (or whatever equivalent exists) and they’d do what they could to help me out, and people that would conversely have the right to expect the same of me.  That’s a big commitment, I mean, you don’t want to go off being friends with hundreds and hundreds of people due to sheer maintenance issues within this schema.

Recently, I had a freelance client that wanted to integrate his Flickr account into his site, so I finally had to sign up for a Flickr account so that I could walk him through some things.  After I signed up, I did some poking around and found myself really liking the Flickr interface.  Dude, seriously, so well though out.  You can just edit descriptions in-place without having to go to another page, and then hit submit, and then go back to the original page—pain in the ass, and a total waste of time, right?  At any rate, more to the point, Flickr does this awesome thing: they let you categorize your “contacts” not only as “friends”, but also as “family”, “family and friends”, and just plain old “contacts”.  Sure, this is basically just setting permissions for certain users, but dude, this is totally revolutionary!  Finally, someone figured out that not every single goddamn person that you meet online is your “friend”.  Brilliant.  I just heard about a different social networking platform called Plaxo that is more like Myspace/Facebook/etc. that apparently has the same Flickr-esque distinctions between your various types of “contacts”.

I think that these distinctions are really important, not only because I put such stock in the word “friend”, but also because this shift in mindset has the potential to stave off the increasing ambiguity of the word in our culture.  I wonder if Myspace/Facebook/etc.’s abuse of “friend” has had any negative impacts on the various types of relationships in our culture…