[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites

[Nancy Baym]

"Befriend" seems to refer quite specifically to creating a friendship 
with someone with all the depth and diversity such a label implies 
across all contexts, while "friending" may or may not refer to 
creating a relationship that resembles the connection that 
"befriending" implies. This confusion/conflation between having a 
personal relationship that holds across varied contexts and having an 
online connection one wishes to maintain is at the heart of both site 
design shortcomings and public outcry about the devaluation of 
friendship in the age of social networking sites.

I have been ranting a lot lately about the tremendous inadequacy of 
the term "friend" in social networking sites, especially as I find my 
own sitelives beginning to converge with the implication that I could 
REALLY use more fine tuned ways to differentiate amongst the 
connections subsumed within "friend."

The introduction of applications into Facebook has really brought 
this home for me. I interviewed iLike's CEO for my blog and he thinks 
it's just great that our music social life should be subsumed within 
Facebook (of course he would given that this application has raised 
iLike's profile a gazillion fold), but I think it's deeply 
problematic to assume that we want the same set of "friends" to share 
in all our online activities.

Flickr at least gives us friend/family/contact, but even that falls 
so far short of what's needed to adequately manage who shares what 
content and what you see about which people.

My blog post about this is here (link to the iLike interview is in 
this post too):

http://www.onlinefandom.com/archives/why-not-all-friends-are-the-same/

Aside from danah boyd's papers on Friendster, the real (i.e. what 
they mean to those who use them) definitions of 'friend' in social 
networking sites is a dreadfully understudied topic. If anyone has 
other references, please pass them along. Thanks.

Nancy

>The idea of using friend as a verb reminds me of befriend (about 2
>million hits in Google) befriending (1.59 million hits) and befriended
>(2.69 million hits).
>
>In other words, there is a well used traditional word that is already in
>place. In addition, I am not sure that "to friend" or "to befriend"
>really captures the essence of what is going on in these sites.
>
>Rich L.