Note: this series of posts is adapted from a larger paper on the nature of Friendship I wrote in 2005. Check back later in the week for the subsequent parts.
One of the fundamental concepts in social media is the idea of Friendship: in order to participate in any social network or to utilize any of the social media tools, one needs to have friends. From a purely technical perspective, a friend is simply a connection on an individual's social graph: a similar entity that has been defined as "connected" to the individual.
But that simple connection isn't defined, in any normative sense, by the technical implementation. Users are free to define that connection however they wish. For example, if I wish to define all my friends in a social network to be everyone named "Jeff," there'd be nothing to stop me from doing so. I could go to my friends page and marvel at all the people named "Jeff."
But that's not really what we consider friendship, and one would be hard pressed to find anyone who'd find some substantive use from a social graph like that. So what could we consider real Friendship?
