Friends will be Friends right till the end

September 15th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine

I was going to start this post by quoting some lyrics, but seeing that the theme tune from “The Golden Girls” started running through my head, I figured that I’d leave it at the Queen lyrics in the title.

Sorry girls, you’re not in this post

So, friends. What are they? People that you grew up with, people who share your interests, people you can tell things to that you wouldn’t tell others, people who stand by you even when they know you’re in the wrong, people who you respect and trust to tell you when you’re in the wrong, and so on.

But, what about in a social media world? Are friends the same? Are your friends on Facebook people that you’ve met? People that you’ve talked to online? People that you’ve even heard of? I know some of mine aren’t – so, why have I added them as friends?

It’s not because I want to have a massive friends list so that I can brag about how I have more friends than anyone else (that is a motivation for some people). It’s generally because they at least show an interest in the same topics that I’m interested in, and we do share a number of friends. A friend of a friend is a potential friend.

On Twitter, a site that allows you to see 140 character messages from all your friends, I currently have 145 people that I’m following - people who either say things that interest or entertain me. As for people following me, I’m closing in on 100. Again, I’m not allowing absolutely anyone to follow me (heck, in most cases, they’re spam accounts that’ll get removed by Twitter anyway). Whenever anyone requests to follow me (my account is protected so only friends can see my postings), I go and review their account. If they seem to be someone that I want to follow me, I allow them to do so, otherwise I reject them.

To me, 150 seems like a good number of people to keep track of. Obviously, it’s going to depend on the frequency of their posts, and the amount of time I want to dedicate to keeping track of what’s going on. But, how can someone legitimately say that they can truly follow over 21,000 people?

The answer is fairly easy – they can’t! Now, there are other ways to keep up-to-date with Twitter than just reading your friend’s posts, but that’s a topic for another day. So, is there any benefit to being added as a friend by one of these ‘friend to everyone’ types?

I guess the only benefit I can really think of is that you can send them a direct (private) message, should you have the need to do so. That’ll lift you out of the clutter. Apart from that, there’s nothing beyond the +1 to your follower’s count.

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