“Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.” from Sunscreen
Cory Doctorow recently wrote that Facebook will sink under the weight of socially obligated “friendships”.
It’s a real problem, but there’s a simple solution.
Friendships in any network should fade over time, but be renewed by interaction.
Current social networks differ from reality on where action is required: In the real world, friendships fade because of inaction: He slowly stops calling and emailing as much, you don’t think to invite him to your party. No one is to blame, it happens all the time.
But in the current online world, friendships can only end by action. Someone has to make the decision to actively de-friend the other. This feels intuitively slimy, and it’s a waste of effort and attention on someone who by definition you aren’t concerned with.
Don Dodge and Fred Wilson are on the right track when they say that email is the real social network, because your interaction with these people is a good indicator of who your friends really are. But any interaction should be included: throwing food, playing games together, going to events together, reading each others blogs…whatever.
In a perfect world, my “friends” in a network would gradually decay to being mere “contacts,” with a corresponding decay in access to my private information. Perhaps at the end the system would alert me that so-and-so is about to lose their friend status and give me an option to prevent it. But the important thing is that action be required to keep the relationship, not to end it.
When I talked to the Facebook guys in September, I was impressed with how much they wanted the friend list to be accurate. They were adamant in not wanting a MySpace-ish culture where people had thousands of “friends”. If they or any other network are to achieve this goal, friend decay is a necessary ingredient.