Friending

Friending is the act of adding someone to a list of "friends" on a social networking service. The notion does not necessarily involve the concept of friendship. It is also distinct from the idea of a "fan" — as employed on the WWW sites of businesses, bands, artists, and others — since it is more than a one-way relationship. A "fan" only receives things. A "friend" can communicate back to the person friending. The act of "friending" someone usually grants that person special privileges (on the service) with respect to oneself. On Facebook, for example, one's "friends" have the privilege of viewing and posting to one's "wall".

The first scholarly definition and examination of friending and defriending (the act of removing someone from one's friend list) was David Fono and Kate Raynes-Goldie's "Hyperfriendship and beyond: Friends and Social Norms on LiveJournal" from 2005, which identified the use of the term as both a noun and a verb by users of early social network site and blogging platform LiveJournal, which was originally launched in 1999.

The addition of people to a friend list without regard to whether one actually is their friend is sometimes known as friend whoring. Matt Jones, of Dopplr, went so far as to coin the expression "friending considered harmful" to describe the problem of focussing upon the friending of more and more people at the expense of actually making any use of a social network.

There are distinct groups of "friends" that one can friend on a social networking service. The notion of a social network friend does not necessarily embody the concept of friendship, although terminology has not yet evolved to distinguish the different types of social networking friends. These three categories of social networking friends are:

Human nature is to reciprocate a friending, marking someone as a friend who has marked oneself as a friend. This is a social norm for social networking services. However, this leads to mixing up who is an actual friend, and who is a contact, not least because tagging someone as a "contact" who has marked one as a "friend" is perceived as impolite. Other concerns about this issue are treated in Sherry Turkle's Alone Together which analyses many behavioral dynamics in social media friendships. Turkle defines herself as "cautiously optimistic", but expresses concern that distance communications may undermine genuine face-to-face spoken discourses, lessening people's expectations of one another.

...
Wikipedia