Different definition of "friend"
Jan. 13th, 2009 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurIt says something that I now have (I just checked) more "friends" on Facebook than I do on LiveJournal, despite the fact that I spend less than 5% as much attention on it. But I've knuckled under and accepted the mantra, "It's just Facebook -- friending doesn't matter", so I'm now accepting pretty much every invitation that comes my way from people I even vaguely know, a far lower standard than I apply to LJ. (Although I'm still tending to toss invitations that garner a completely blank "who?" from me, and I get a surprising number of those as well.)
In practice, "friend" really means "acquaintance" in FB's vocabulary. This *may* prove to be okay as they ramp up their "friend list" mechanism: if apps pick up on this properly and permit fine-grained filtering, it's not necessarily a train wreck. But I'm still fighting my own LJ-trained instincts: since I actively read the majority of the people that I friend on LJ (and rarely unfriend), I'm used to that being a pretty high bar...
In practice, "friend" really means "acquaintance" in FB's vocabulary. This *may* prove to be okay as they ramp up their "friend list" mechanism: if apps pick up on this properly and permit fine-grained filtering, it's not necessarily a train wreck. But I'm still fighting my own LJ-trained instincts: since I actively read the majority of the people that I friend on LJ (and rarely unfriend), I'm used to that being a pretty high bar...