Ever since Facebook bought FriendFeed, I’ve been getting daily notices from FriendFeed that complete strangers are following me, with dubious names like Casual Encounters and Scanna69. If I’ve never met you (and you’re a robot), how can we be friends? And doesn’t being stalked by strangers and spammers implicitly undermine the concept of a “Friend”Feed in the first place?
We can blame MySpace for the Orwellian devolution by which the term “friend” ceased to have any true meaning (at least online). Twitter was savvy enough to rename its users’ contacts “followers,” which connotes a far less intimate (and often unreciprocated) relationship. And Facebook’s use of “friend” is at least halfway defensible, since its original intent was to link people who actually did know each other in college.
But when a service includes the term “friend” in its name, shouldn’t it mean something more? Shouldn’t the interactions that take place among alleged friends be more valuable and run deeper than passing exchanges with followers or fans? Or have we finally reached the stage where we need to coin a new term for the people we actually know?
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Tags: audience, common sense, facebook, MySpace, networking, Social Media, Sociology, Twitter
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Eban
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Bill Cammack









