What’s a “Friend” These Days?
A couple of days ago, I was on a television show called The Agenda that looked whether “Is Facebook a Fad?”.
For the most part, it was pretty standard fare: why Facebook has become so big so fast; how can it be worth $15-billion; why did Microsoft make the $250-million investment; and how will Facebook make money.
But during the last part of the conversation - which featured five people, including Mathew Ingram and Om Malik - did it move into interesting territory: what do people get from Facebook and whether having digital friends is the same as having real relationships with off-line friends.
Here, the panel split. Om and I rallied on the side of real friends - people you actually meet, see and talk to - while some other panelists see Facebook as an amazing tool that encourages people to be even more social, and how it opens up opportunities to develop new friendships. It’s a topic that you could have done an entire show on.
Personally, I find the whole friends thing on Facebook somewhat bizarre.
I have 222 people, many of whom I’ve never met or, at best, have little or no connection. Yet, I get plenty of friend requests. Do I reject some of them or accept them all? So far, I’ve pretty much accepted everyone based on the idea that my presence on Facebook is business-focused as opposed to personal. I see having a Facebook profile a lot like having a business card.
Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should have been a little more discrimminating about my “friends”, or perhaps created a second profile for “real” friends. I guess it’s based on the idea that the bigger your Facebook network, the more people who know about who you are and what you do. As a result, I’ve become quite cautious about what I put on Facebook given there are people on my network that I really don’t know.
Sure, it’s my fault for climbing on the Facebook Friends bandwagon, although I’m more of an invitee than a inviter. Maybe my mixed views on Facebook have to do with the fact I’m a people person with lots of friends (real ones who’s I’ve met and cultivated relationships) as opposed to digital animal. It could be a personality thing or (and I hate to admit it) an age thing.
That said, I have connected and met a lot of people through the Web. Blogging, for example, has opened up a new world. It was interesting yesterday that Wordpress domo Matt Mullenweg said during a keynote at BlogWord that although he was on 15 social networks “I feel like the best profile of me is my blog. I will go through a person’s blog archives if we are considering hiring them.”
At the end of the day, the question is whether it’s worth being on Facebook. Maybe, but I could happily live without it.
Update: According to a British study by Dr. Will Reader, people who have a lot of Facebook friends have no more real friends than non-Facebook users. (Hat tip: Digital Lifestyles). The NYT’s Bits suggests Facebook’s new social advertising strategy could prompt reduce the number of friends.
(Cartoon credit: Gaping Void)
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Matt Mullenweg, Om Malik
November 9th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Hi, Mark,
I very much enjoyed the Facebook discussion on TVO’s “Agenda”. Like you I use it for professional reasons and was a somewhat early subscriber.
I’ve often advised my 15-year-old to discriminate between “friends” and “associates.” Now he gets to throw the motherly advice back at me every time I log on to Facebook. And although I remained charmed by the clean, simple interface and captivated by the apps, it may be time to move on …
November 9th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Hang in there Mark, Facebook is going to address this very issue by allowing us to have two profiles, a “business” and a personal one. Not sure when this is going to happen but it is rumored to be happening soon.
November 10th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I’m in a very similar place, mentally, sometimes wondering if I should create a second FB account or start pruning my more distant friends in mass because who of my nnn friends I get updates from neither seems to have rhyme nor reason — you would think FB would clue in that getting updates from my wife, would be a priority, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an update from her on my page.
When I really think about how to work around this problem, I come to the point of Hugh’s cartoon — why should I change! The tool, Facebook is broken, the software doesn’t work the way I want it to yet.
I get a lot out of Facebook, but now that we have it, I continue to find it less of a solution, and more of an opportunity for them or someone else to do it even better.
November 11th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
I’m not sure the issue is whether you can live without Facebook, but rather as you suggest in the title, what is it that defines a friend.
On the show I ended up taking the opposite side of what Om was saying, and to a lesser extent yourself. However what I find fascinating is the way the concept of friendship, and at a larger level, the concept of community, is changing. Facebook influences this, but it would be happening regardless of Facebook due to the Internet in general.
Some people correctly identify how rapidly the definitions of these words are shifting and becoming entirely subjective. Everyone seems to have their own sense of what a friend is, and what being part of a community means. So much so that you can get a sense of who someone is based on how they define the circles that make up their social experiences. Nancy touched upon this on-air by openly wondering if we were learning more about Om than discussing Facebook.
There’s been rumours for a while that Facebook will introduce greater differentiation within social network layers, and the ad-platform is a step in that direction. That way you can have categories of friends that are self-defined and organized. Maybe they’ll even take over and integrate with hatebook.
-jesse
November 14th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[...] he is inviting everyone to visit him there. For every thousand such people, there are people like Mark Evans, who would like to have a better control on their social graph. Mark not only wants to prune the [...]
November 21st, 2007 at 5:33 pm
[...] Update: Rick Segal weighs in with some thoughts on Facebook, including the “redefinition” of the word “friend” - something I recently blogged about here. [...]