A perennial discussion around online social networking sites is how do you decided who to add as a friend. MyBlogLog has a new service called friender that has caused me to think about this again recently and the topic has emerged in two different groups I’m part of as well as in a discussion on Twitter.

The Friender service raises a bunch of interesting questions. It goes out and searches other sites and finds people that you know on those sites that are also on MyBlogLog and asks if you want to add them as a contact. In addition, MyBlogLog has taken everyone that has added me as a contact and listed them as pending contacts for me.

This raises several issues to think about. The first is what do we mean by a ‘contact’. For me, in MyBlogLog, a contact is someone that writes a blog that I’m interested in reading, or is interested in reading my blog. Since I like to read lots of different blogs and since I like lots of different people to read my blog, I am very liberal about adding people as contacts. Currently, I have 283 contacts at MyBlogLog.

A second issue is symmetry. Contacts in MyBlogLog do not need to be symmetrical. I can add someone as a contact in MyBlogLog without them adding me as a contact back. I think this is very useful and a better way of thinking about contacts online.

The third issue is data portability. The information that I provide in other sites can be brought into MyBlogLog. In addition, MyBlogLog provides a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) file listing the services that MyBlogLog knows that I have as well as the contacts I have. This data can be read and processed by computer programs to build maps of friendships, see who is in other services where you haven’t subscribed to them yet, and so on. Yet many people don’t realize how much information is available this way and the implications it has for privacy.

Lets now take this to a discussion that occurred on the Group Psychotherapy mailing list. One therapist mentioned that a client had asked about adding him as a friend on Facebook. The therapist suggested that this is a discussion that should be had in the group, including an exploration of why the person wants to add the therapist as a friend and how the rest of the group feels about it. A different person said that he believes that therapists shouldn’t be on Facebook.

Robert Hsiung, who works at University of Chicago and has done some very interesting work on how clients online activities affects groups presented his suggestions for how therapists should deal with Facebook.

• Therapists should not initiate friend requests to clients.
• Therapists should accept friend requests from either all or none of their clients.
• Therapists should behave professionally on Facebook.
• Therapists should consider separate personal and professional profiles.
• Clients should be informed about the potential risks and benefits of being Facebook friends with their therapists, for example:

  http://www.dr-bob.org/facebook/friends.html

Dr. Bob hopes to talk about this more at the American Medical Informatics Association 2008 Annual Symposium. in Washington DC this coming November. There is plenty to talk about in this subject and Bob’s suggestions provide a good starting point.

One of the things to note about Facebook friendships is that that are symmetrical. To add someone as a friend, the friend has to agree. As with MyBlogLog, I have a fairly loose policy about who I add as a friend on Facebook, and currently have around 570 friends on Facebook. However, Facebook requests from people that I don’t know anything about or that have pictures that don’t resonate with me don’t get added.

This takes me to John Herman’s comments about Facebook friends. John is a teacher who has been asked by students about adding him as a friend on Facebook. He speaks about only adding students as friends when those students didn't have anything on their Facebook pages that could damage their reputations his own. It has resulted in many great pedagogical opportunities and seems to be a particularly wise starting point. To the extent that adding Facebook friends comes up in the first therapists group, I hope both Bob and John’s talking points get brought into the discussion.

Relationships on Twitter are asymmetrical. Following someone on Twitter simply means, at least for me, that you think the person is writing something interesting. As a result, I’m currently following 414 people on Twitter and 723 people are following me. Major Twitter personalities like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis follow and are followed by twenty to thirty thousand people. I don’t know how they could read very many of the tweets from everyone they are following, let alone have much of a sense of who the people they are following really are. After all, we are talking about twenty times the number of people that Dunbar believed was the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships”

Yet there is something a little creepy sounding about ‘followers’ and people have been talking about whether Twitter and sites like Seesmic, which have picked up the ‘following’ language might want to change their nomenclature.

There are plenty of different approaches to adding friends, followers, contacts, or whatever else you want to call them. They depend on the nature of the community, how portable the data is, whether it is symmetrical or not, and plenty of other factors. For me, I’ll continue to have a fairly liberal approach to adding friends, but will constantly be re-evaluating. How about you?