When We Shouldn't Call a Friend a Friend; or, The Misunderstanding of Facebook Friendship

Personally, I've never been sure what constitutes too many friends on sites like Facebook.

Apart from anything else, I've never understood the idea of adding a celebrity (or mock celebrity) as a friend, nor the idea of adding a band. Things like that require a basic (and wilful) misunderstanding of the term 'friend'. Liking these people makes you a fan, not their friend.

But adding celebs etc. is one way people have of boosting their 'friend' quota. We all like to feel we have an active, healthy social life and what better way to prove that (and measure it) than by pointing to a large pool of people one can count as 'friend'? A big number on a computer screen must be true, after all. Is there also any way to better quantify social popularity, and therefore make a competition out of friendship?

Recently, I watched a French film (My Best Friend, or Mon Meilleur Ami if you prefer) about an art dealer who seems to have a social life but absolutely no friends. Not one. Not a single person he cares enough about to talk to, nor anyone that cares about him – not even his daughter. It (predictably enough) raises questions about what makes a friend, how we treat friends and the nature of friendship. This is a man whose Facebook page would state that he had no friends whatsoever – a depressing, desultory naught.

Unless he used Facebook in the way that you're supposed to – which a minority does these days. The other day I heard a friend (and let's just quickly establish that this was a real-life friend whom I've met only in the flesh and isn't a Facebook friend – there is a difference; the bonds of a Facebook friendship are much looser) complain of a Facebook user: “A thousand friends! He can't possible know that many people!”

Initially, I'm tempted to agree. Surely this chap (not someone either of us knew) can't be holding down cordial relations with so many people. He'd forget who nine out of ten of were. Most of them must be meaningless relationships with people he's met once or twice, if at all. It was even temping to picture him as a social whore with no real friends but a string of acquaintances whose personal details he can access at a mouse click – slave to the ever-rising friends counter, his ego stroked by having more friends than his rivals. What an butterfly-like, lonely and essentially cold person he must be. I don't mean butterfly-like in the good way; this is a man whose attention and affection flitters from place to place, a man who can never settle himself on any interaction before moving to the next.

Then I realised that wasn't the case at all. To have such assumptions and thoughts about a Facebook user is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of Facebook. If you use Facebook as a social tool, to keep in touch with old friends and talk to people that you see every day, or just for the rafts of applications, quizzes and games forever being pumped out of the ether, then hundreds of friends you hardly speak to is perhaps like treating human acquaintance as prizes in the trophy cabinet that is Facebook.

However, the site is supposed to be used as a social NETWORKING tool – in this case, social merely referring to people within a network, as opposed to corporations (etc.) within a network. It should be a system of interconnected professional/serious people using the internet for communication and (a more elusive term to define) networking. Under such usage, the more friends the better. Though some blame for confusion must lie with whoever decided to use the word 'friend' and not 'contact'. A thousand contacts on a social network sounds more plausible (and more easily-justified) than a thousand friends on a social site.

Alas, people (myself included) have failed to understand this, and in a way Facebook's success has fatally undermined it. Rather than the slimline professional linkage it should have been, Facebook has become to University students and recent graduates what MySpace is to Sixth Formers and GCSE kids. It's used as a social interaction and gaming tool, not networking, by the majority of its users – it's more toy than tool.

This in part explains the rise of Twitter. It offers to the older professional what Facebook should have offered, and once did. Something simple and stream-lined, an easy way of posting brief bits of important information for others and keeping abreast of what like-minded professionals are doing and thinking. The problem with Facebook was that once people reach that age at which MySpace and Bebo stop being cool (it happens) they use Facebook for the same purpose. Although in my case MySpace stopped letting me log in so I made the full transition to my already-existent Facebook early. I had been trying to keep a distinction running: MySpace for school friends, Facebook for Uni and networking. It wasn't a distinction that survived once all of my school friends moved to Uni and added me on Facebook.

Facebook is a site that no longer does what it set out to do; its purpose has changed, because its users (and therefore their needs) have changed. Networking on Facebook didn't stand a chance once the socialites forced the professionals into a minority.