ON A "FRIEND" BY ANY NAME

DEFINING RELATIONSHIPS

Last night at dinner, I started telling my wife about a post by Robert Scoble's wife, Maryam, posted on HER blog.  I should explain that I know Robert primarily through blogging and various web social networks.

The post, titled "I never asked for an iPhone, part II" , is one of the best, short and sweet reviews I've read of the gizmo anywhere, professional or otherwise.  It's fresh because it reflects a mainstream person's view of the device.  Not someone who's pre-disposed to like it because it's a cool gadget, and it's from Apple.

But the reason I was telling the story of Maryam's post at dinner, was because it really was about husbands giving geeky gifts like the iPhone to their wives, primarily because they want to play with the gadget themselves.

It's something my wife accuses me of all the time.  And I'm guity as charged.  I got her a Prius last year for her commutes to LA in the HOV lane, because I really wanted to drive it around myself.

She got a big chuckle out of the story, and I then started to tell her about the Scobles. 

To my surprise, I could talk a lot more about them socially than many of the people we know in real-life.

I  could talk  about them expecting a new baby in September, and about Robert's son, who's really into  World of Warcraft (stuck at level 55 apparently, which is impressive by itself). 

Through Robert's vigorous participation in services like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce etc., and his videos on his various blogs and Facebook, I'd apparently gotten to know the Scobles pretty well.

And it's obviously an asymmetric relationship because they don't know us much at all.

But it's the brave new world of people who are increasingly a part of your life and yet they aren't.  But they're value-added relationships all the same.

As I mentioned before, I've gotten to know Robert primarily through blogging over the last few years, but we've never really hung out in real life to date.  But I probably know him better than many of my acquaintances in the real world.

And over the past couple of years, I've made dozens of web friends in this way. 

Their names and faces on my list of contacts in the various social network services have real emotional resonance.  And that's a good thing.

Increasingly the names in my social network address books are as important as the ones in my Outlook address book.  And the overlap between them is decreasing, even though most of my social network address books started off as imports of my Outlook address book.

Admittedly "friend" may be a too strong a word for all this, but it's a lot closer than the word "acquaintance".   And definitely much more emotionally meaningful than the word "contact".

By the time we're through with this whole social networking thing going mainstream, one of two things will happen.  Either the definitions of the current words for these relationships get meaningfully expanded, or we'll come up with entirely new words for these relationships.  Or both.

Regardless of what you call it, these web "friendships" are a pretty cool experience, and not very new to many of you who're avid users of various social network services like Facebook, MySpace, mybloglog, etc.

But what we need to remind ourselves is that this is NOT a mainstream phenomenon yet, despite the millions of teenagers and college kids that have truly embraced these services.

And that it will be some day very soon.

We'll be having mainstream dinner conversations, listening to non-geeks talking about the lives of friends they know only from the web.

And that's what I'd start to call a real second life.

P.S.  you're welcome to "friend me" via the various social networks like Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, Pownce, Mybloglog, etc.  I'll friend you back (the links are in the side-bars of this blog).  These virtual acquaintance-ships are what this web 2.0 thing is really all about.

Comments

[Robert Scoble]

What's interesting about this world is now Maryam and I are both talking about your conversation with your wife. :-)

[John park]

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