People join social networking sites to connect with their friends, so it’s no surprise that when they use those sites, they are friendly. It is the norm to set a fairly low bar for accepting friend requests, which is how contact lists fill up with people you barely remember from grade school, summer camp or last night.
The exception to such promiscuous networking is exes and enemies. Because inclusion in your network is so low significance, exclusion can be highly significant. You are less likely to be friends with people toward whom you have negative feelings, even if they are connected to the rest of your network.
And that is why when Google Buzz datamines your friendship map and displays a list of people you may also know, it’s quite likely to be a bunch of people you don’t want to connect to. It’s also a good illustration of how mapping friendship networks can reveal information that is not just personal but even emotionally raw.
The other thing that’s weird about social networking, friends or enemies, is that they level of investment of two “friends” can be very uneven.
Before online social networking, if we were friends we invested relatively similar amounts in the friendship. We both spent the same time talking on the phone, having lunch together, etc.
Now, however, one friend might spend significantly more time following the other person. Most people see this as a good thing – they have lots of “fans” – but in the case of an ex following you, it could also feel like stalking.
The way SN sites allow people to access your private life without any actual interaction probably creates all kinds of asymmetrical relationships (some good and some bad), but I suppose that’s baked into the nature of modeling friendship interactions as a series of semiexclusive broadcasts. It’s also why we mentally distinguish between Facebook friends and “real” friends.