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From Friending and Following: Editing Friending and following
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Social network friending and friendship[edit]
There are distinct groups of "friends" that one can friend on a social networking service. The notion of a social network friend does not necessarily embody the concept of friendship, although terminology has not yet evolved to distinguish the different types of social networking friends. These three categories of social networking friends are: change to - they can however be define by three categories.


 * friends who are actually known
 * These are people that may be one's friends or family in real life, with whom one has regular interaction either on-line or off-line.


 * organizational friends
 * These are companies and other organizations who maintain a "friending" relationship as a contacts list.


 * complete strangers
 * These are social networking "friends" with whom one has no relationship at all.

Within these categories "friends" can be made up of strong ties, weak existing ties, weak latent ties, and parasocial ties. Strong ties can be made up of close family members and friends where self-disclosure, intimacy and frequent content occur. Weak existing ties can be made up of acquaintances, co-workers and distance relatives with whom the user has inconsistent contact. Weak latent ties can be made up of people within a similar geographical location or profession that can be used as a potential future bridge to other connections. Parasocial ties can be made up of celebrities, public figures and media personas.

Human nature is to reciprocate a friending, marking someone as a friend who has marked oneself as a friend. This is a social norm for social networking services. However, this leads to mixing up who is an actual friend, and who is a contact. [remove -not least because] Tagging someone as a "contact" who has marked one as a "friend" can be [is] perceived as impolite. Other concerns about this issue are treated in Sherry Turkle's Alone Together which analyses many behavioral dynamics in social media friendships. Turkle defines herself as "cautiously optimistic", but expresses concern that distance communications may undermine genuine face-to-face spoken discourses, lessening people's expectations of one another.

One social networking service, FriendFeed, allows one to friend someone as a "fake" friend. The person "fake" friended receives the usual notifications for friending, but that person's updates are not received. Gavin Bell, author of Building Social Web Applications, describes this mechanism as "ludicrous".

Results from a 2007 survey the Center for the Digital Future stated that only 23% of internet users have at least one virtual friend whom they have only met online. Ideally the number of virtual friends is directly proportional to the use of the Internet, but the same survey showed 20% of [removed- that among the] heavy-users (more than 3 hours/day) [removed-which] who [removed-reported] claimed an average of 8.7% online friends, [removed- the 20%] reported at least one relationship that started virtually and migrated to in-person contact.

This results and other concerning issues are included in the book Networked: The New Social Operating System co-written by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman in 2012.