The Meaning of Friend

For all of time people have had their own definitions. The meaning of a word like friend is not universal. A friend to me might be someone I call at least five times a week, while you might call that guy you met once in third grade a friend. Before the internet this wasn’t really a problem. However you defined friend was fine by me.

All of a sudden social networking sites came along and friend became a verb.The action part was much more important than the adjective. Everything was cool until Friendster decided to define the social meaning of friend as well. A friend could not be a made up person or object. That, along with incredibly slow service, sunk the site.

Now Facebook seems to be repeating the mistake.

http://www.portigal.com/blog/the-nature-of-communities/

September 11, 2006