LJ != Friends

[yesthattom]

Do you ever forget that not everyone you read on LJ is a friend?

Now and then I see great post by someone on LJ and start to send personal email inviting them to hang out, or just to introduce myself but I stop myself when I realize... this person doesn’t even know that I read their LJ!

I read a lot of Live Journals, many by people that I don’t know. I also import a lot of personal blogs into LJ using the syndication feature. Many LJs that I read are just people that posted something interesting to another community and I started following their life.

It is quite weird.

Comments

[dieppe.livejournal.com]

Yep, I realize that all the time. A friend is someone I could cry on their shoulder, and they could rely on me to be there for them. Frankly, not half of my readership is that to me, or I to them...

So yeah.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

Well, we have at least met in person. Dinner with several other folks from "that mailing list"

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

I blame LJ for two things: picking bad terminology, and then overloading it. There are three groups:
1) my friends,
2) people whose LJs I want to read regularly, and
3) people who I want to have access to a restricted subset of my posts
and no two of those are the same, or even terribly similar.

To have a UI element labeled 'friend' smacks of that conversation in the seventh grade with that one girl who wanted you to know that her friend likes you, and by that she means 'likes you' likes you, and not just likes you, and she wanted to know if you could be 'friends' friends and not just 'friends'. Dear LJ: what are we, twelve? That sucks!

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

I'm online-socialized enough that it seems completely ordinary to me. Haven't you met a bunch of friends that way over the years?

[baerana.livejournal.com]

everyone on my lj is a friend, if someone randomly adds me, i'll add them back but if we don't click and become friendly pretty soon, I remove them, i've met about 3/4 of my friends list but consider them all somewhere between friends and friendly acquaintances

[mbarr.livejournal.com]

I've met the vast majority of my flist (multiple times, at least) with the exception of a few people. I'm not including the syndication of Gaiman, or Peter David, or a few other folks w/ LJ's that I just follow.


So, overall, i'm pretty comfortable w/ a all friends post to invite them to a party. The only issue I have is that some folks just don't check LJ :)

[polydad.livejournal.com]

I invite people over frequently based on nothing more than "I like what you wrote." Sometimes they even accept.

In fact, I'm about to go to bed with one such person. It's sure a better basis for picking friends than comparing astrological signs in drinking establishments.

best,

Joel

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

It depends on how one defines "friend". I was surprised at how many of the young adults (19-25, firmly part of the MySpace and Facebook generation) I went to school with a couple of years ago make little differentiation between friends and MySpace friends. It was certainly cultural shift for me.

Its a shift in perception that has always existed to a small extent within small subgroups (ham radios operators, long term pen pals) but technology has vastly broadened the change in the word "friend".

I'm a child of the 70s and 80s and I too, shake my fist at the sloppy use of the word friend to describe someone whose journal I read (sometimes on a sporadic basis.)

FWIW, though, there are people whose journal I read periodically and if something strikes me the right way, I usually don't hesitate to drop them a note introducing myself and letting them now that I am a reader. If they live close enough, I'm not beyond inviting or accepting an invitation to meet.

It is an odd (to us) cultural shift.

[ceo]

I almost never "friend" people I haven't personally met. You are, in fact, the sole exception.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

I very rarely do, and usually because they're a FOAF who thinks we'll have something in common, or they encountered me in another medium (like OKCupid) and we've corresponded for a while.

Tom, however, I know in person :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_white_trash_/]

i do that... alot.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

You're one of the people I feel that way about. I love reading your LJ and occasionally post a comment. Sometimes I feel like suggesting dinner or hanging out... then I realize "d'oh! I don't want to sound like a stalker! Heck I don't even know where she lives!

(Ok, I just checked... North Carolina; I visit Durham now and then, BTW)

Tom

[lordlnyc.livejournal.com]

I just looked at my "Friends" and "Mutual Friends" and I see most people fall in mostly one of these groups....

1) Person that I know and have at least met in person.
2) Friend of a friend that I might/did met in person.
3) Friend of Brenda's that I might/did met in person.
4) Person that I know from a activist community [maybe met].
5) There is a number of people that I like/love reading their LJ, but don't know and most likely will never met.*

* I believe that you can fall into all but group 5 [take your pick]. There is a funny story about one person that fall into 5. They saw that I friended them, and notice that you are on my friends list [I guessing Mutual Friends] and wrote me and said "Oh your a friend of Tom's" [I believe that you are Mutual Friends and have met] and friended me back. We have written each other a number of time since but never met. I do believe that we both would like to met some day. [sends a wave] I think you know who I mean?

[freeko.livejournal.com]

Not everyone on LJ is a friend? But that holds true for the various communities we are involved in. I mean there are a lot of lefty progressives that I consider arrogant and can't stand. Same goes for Bi, Poly and Trans communities too.

[babbage.livejournal.com]

Yup. I frequently go to respond to somebody's LJ post (often ianlancetaylor's) only to realise that it's a syndicated feed and they'll never read it.