Friending, Ancient or Otherwise
THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make "friends" with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other's walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.
Context & Ripple Effects
The question of what an online 'friend' actually is has been building for over a year: the Financial Times profiled the field's leading researcher of internet friendship in October 2006, and the BBC asked readers outright in July 2007 whether their online friends were real. This Times essay pushes the frame from sociology to anthropology — friending, wall-scrawling and avatar-building as old identity practices wearing new interfaces.
The timing matters because the friend graph just became a balance-sheet item. Microsoft put $240 million into Facebook at a $15 billion valuation in November 2007, and Facebook spent that same month retreating from its Beacon ad program after two waves of member protest over tracking — evidence that whoever defines the friendship relation also controls a monetizable asset.
First-order effects
- Facebook, MySpace and Second Life are competing on tools for performing identity — walls, avatars, visible friend lists — which turns friendship maintenance itself into product design.
- Advertisers gain access to self-declared relationship graphs, and Facebook's Beacon retreat shows members will contest exactly how that asset gets used against their consent.
Second-order effects
- Google, already locked with Facebook in a rivalry over talent and prospective advertising revenue, faces pressure to answer social-graph-based ad targeting with a competing product or concede premium brand dollars.
- MySpace and Second Life must decide whether to copy Facebook's identity-performance features or differentiate — since a $15 billion benchmark makes undifferentiated social graphs look cheap.
Third-order effects
- If friending keeps scaling, personal relationships become structured, queryable data — inviting scholarly study and, eventually, fights over privacy norms that platforms have so far settled by improvisation.
- Social etiquette gets renegotiated at scale: acceptance, rejection and visibility of 'friends' shift from private judgment to public act, with platforms writing defaults that users then revolt against, as Beacon demonstrated.
The trend: Social networking is converting informal human relationships into structured, monetizable platform assets, and the contest over who defines a 'friend' — users, advertisers, or investors — is becoming the industry's central negotiation.