Danah Boyd's Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites takes a look into the social constructs found in social networking sites, particularly the "friends" feature. Friends seem to be an integral part of all social networking sites. Obviously, such a site without the feature would be very "social" at all.

The interesting aspect about social networking sites and their friends feature is that friends are made public for others to see. This creates an interesting dynamic where your friends determine your social niche and your place within the network. The number of friends you have is displayed as well and may be a testament to ones popularity or likeability. In this sense, your network of "friends" is what anchors you into the network.

Boyd goes on to make some assertions about how friending norms evolved and why. At this point, I got to thinking: "what friending norms?" Sure, if somebody tries to friend us on a social networking site that we have never heard of and is from a long distance away we might not accept it (some people would, though). What I feel turns half of this upside down is how nonchalantly many people accept "friends" who they now nothing about simply because they have a high number of mutual friends, are from the same area, go to the same university, etc. I'm not going to lie, I have quite a few such friends. Do I feel this is bad? No. I do wonder, though, if Boyd is over-analyzing this "friend" thing too much by applying assumptions and generalization gained from in-real-life networks to social networks. Social networks clearly have many differences with "real" networks, and one such difference is often their norms and rules.

Overall, I feel Boyd does offer some insightful ideas about friending on social networking sites, but I have to question if some of the ideas are bit over thought.