With Friends Like These, Who Needs Friends?

Recently I was talking with a new-to-social-networks friend of mine about what the hell we're doing with all these online communities. I pointed out that while a benefit of these systems is collecting your friends in one place, it's still fairly difficult to differentiate between loose and strong ties. That is, what's the difference between someone you've known for 10 years vs. someone you just met at a party? In your head you know that the long time friend is a different kind of a connection, but the SNS haven't been able to figure that out yet. There are probably things you'd tell one friend that you aren't sure yet about telling the person you just met, but when your only option is friend or not friend, how do you control what info goes to what people?

Facebook has an option of friending someone while only allowing them to see your "limited profile" which is a step in the right direction, but honestly adding in one more level hardly solves the issue of classifying what is probably hundreds of different kinds of friends. In efforts to continue filing people into handy little categories there is now a "Top Friends" application that, similar to the "Top 8" on [ULR=http://myspace]MySpace, allows you to highlight people who are really your friends, or at least you really want people to think they are your friends. Not surprisingly these two steps actually cause more problems than they solve. In fact these actually take what are supposed to be comfortable social interactions and make them awkward and drama filled.

In the case of a limited profile, people know you've chosen this option the moment they click to your profile and only see half the info they can see on their other friends pages. In the case of a set of "Top" friends, more often than not there are people who think they should be in that list and will take it personally when they aren't included. Or worse, people you don't even know will ask you to put them in there and then you are forced to either do it, which negates the value of the list all together, or tell them "no" which puts you in an uncomfortable situation. Software and services designed to help facilitate social behavior should never create uncomfortable situations, but unfortunately it's all too common.



And this doesn't only apply to friends. Here on SuicideGirls we have the option of picking favorite girls. I'm fairly certain this feature was put in so members could highlight the sets and photos of the girls they really liked, but quickly it became a status issue with "favorite" spots on certain members pages becoming coveted achievements. Recently I actually deleted all of my favorites because I was sick of getting messages from girls asking to be added to my list. Not responding, or saying no totally sucked, but I didn't want to just add them to a list that was supposed to be something I hand picked so rather than keep stressing about I just killed that list all together.



While my take-my-ball-and-go-home solution works for some people, others are resorting to a different form of not playing. Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing responded to a question asked on twitter about these friends lists creating awkward situations by saying, "I recently changed all my 'top friends' on MySpace to non-human entities (blogs, tv shows, dead cultural icons) for that VERY reason." If there's no way to tell your real friends from your casual acquaintances, and very special lists of very special friends have to be deleted to stacked with things other than actual friends so as not to hurt any feelings -- doesn't that kind of defeat the point? Have you ever felt obligated to put someone in a list you really didn't think they belonged in? How did you deal with it?