This is actually troubling me a little. Friend is such an old word to descibe part of what the Friendster network hosts. In one aspect I think that it's perhaps all a matter of degree.
For example I don't know David Weinberger, in fact we've never met nor have we spoken on the telephone, but compared with 6.999 billion other people on the planet, I do know him better than a complete stranger. We've occasionally exchanged emails over the last three or so years on various topics and he considered me friendsome enough to send me a pre-release copy of his book SPLJ last year for which I was very grateful.
From our Web based relationship I have discovered that I can appreciate and I am interested in what he has to say about the frontiers of the Web. I think he's funny. He seems like a decent chap. But is he a friend in the conventional sense? No. Is he a complete stranger? No. From what I know of him I'm sure, or at least I'd like to think, that we'd stand a good chance of becoming friends given some major geographical realignment.
It seems that there's this relationship middle-ground on the Web just north of 'I know of him' and just south of 'I know him' and certainly several miles away from at least one conventional, physical definition of the word Friend. My blogroll is entitled 'equaintances', a cute way of describing this quirk of knowing people without really knowing them. But it's deeper than that.
Perhaps this is the future of friendship and relationships, perhaps in twenty years it'll be possible to be married to someone you've never met, with cyber families comprised entirely of advanced, highly evolved decendents of the Tamagotchi.
For example I don't know David Weinberger, in fact we've never met nor have we spoken on the telephone, but compared with 6.999 billion other people on the planet, I do know him better than a complete stranger. We've occasionally exchanged emails over the last three or so years on various topics and he considered me friendsome enough to send me a pre-release copy of his book SPLJ last year for which I was very grateful.
From our Web based relationship I have discovered that I can appreciate and I am interested in what he has to say about the frontiers of the Web. I think he's funny. He seems like a decent chap. But is he a friend in the conventional sense? No. Is he a complete stranger? No. From what I know of him I'm sure, or at least I'd like to think, that we'd stand a good chance of becoming friends given some major geographical realignment.
It seems that there's this relationship middle-ground on the Web just north of 'I know of him' and just south of 'I know him' and certainly several miles away from at least one conventional, physical definition of the word Friend. My blogroll is entitled 'equaintances', a cute way of describing this quirk of knowing people without really knowing them. But it's deeper than that.
Perhaps this is the future of friendship and relationships, perhaps in twenty years it'll be possible to be married to someone you've never met, with cyber families comprised entirely of advanced, highly evolved decendents of the Tamagotchi.