On online friendship

Steve Rubel and my Web Worker Daily col­league and friend, Anne Zelenka have both writ­ten par­tic­u­larly elo­quent posts on the nature of online friendships.

The notion of friend­ship, espe­cially as it is embod­ied in most social com­put­ing appli­ca­tions is, to my mind, a lit­tle bro­ken. This is usu­ally because the friend­ship is binary in nature — either it is, or it isn’t. Some­times this works. At other times, it both­ers me.

In tak­ing a look at the social net­works I use with any reg­u­lar­ity — Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn — one of these presents me with issues, the other two don’t.

On Face­book, some­one is either your friend, or not. I think on some­thing as rich as Face­book, where you can engage for hours, there needs to be greater gran­u­lar­ity — so in order of most to least famil­iar, I’d like to be able to mark some­one as fam­ily, friend, col­league or contact.

On Twit­ter, the dis­tinc­tion is less prob­lem­atic. The con­tin­u­ous par­tial atten­tion nature of Twit­ter and the light­weight­ness of it means that the follower/​following notion just works.

On LinkedIn, you sim­ply have con­tacts. For a business-​​centric tool like LinkedIn, the rela­tion­ship is clear — this is some­one you know pro­fes­sion­ally (most of the time). The only point it actu­ally mat­ters deeply is when you rec­om­mend some­one or are rec­om­mended. Then what mat­ters is the roles you filled and where. LinkedIn han­dles this more than ade­quately already.

Thus far, I sound like a lit­tle bit of a cur­mud­geon. Let me put the record straight. I absolutely love social com­put­ing for every­thing it lets me do.

I can meet (vir­tu­ally) and work with peo­ple that were sim­ply out of my reach less than five years ago. I have some very rich, pro­fes­sion­ally ful­fill­ing rela­tion­ships with some of these peo­ple despite never hav­ing met them face to face — some­thing I hope to rem­edy next week at Office 2.0. I even call some of these peo­ple real friends.

I can main­tain rela­tion­ships with friends inter­state and over­seas that would be much more dif­fi­cult with­out social com­put­ing. I can meet peo­ple that I might oth­er­wise never encounter. This is incred­i­bly excit­ing (and for a nat­ural intro­vert like me, not a big hurdle).

I don’t tend to friend any­one that invites me, there usu­ally has to be an exist­ing link. That link could be an intro­duc­tion through another friend or col­league, hav­ing met some­where or being mem­bers of a com­mu­nity of some sort.

Like Anne, I’m not a gath­erer of friends online. I have a cir­cle of peo­ple that exist on all the social tools I use and oth­ers that appear on just one or two. Unfor­tu­nately there’s no easy way of coor­di­nat­ing that issue yet.

Over at Global Neigh­bour­hoods, Shel Israel has posted his Face­book friends pol­icy. It pretty much matches mine.