friends vs Friends

While reading "Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8," all I could think was 'wow, this is so outdated.' It was published only three years ago, yet it doesn't include Facebook in its argument, and so I couldn't help but feel that it was behind the times. However, I felt the points Boyd makes are still pretty accurate. The role online "friendships" plays in real life relationships, the great publicity benefit social networks provide for media figures, and the incredible social organizing abilities of these social networks are all very true. All that aside, I am not quite sure what this whole "friend" situation has to do with our network map. The goal was never to implement a "friend" application to the site, right? I see how connections between "friend" links and our network map can be drawn - "collector friends" are similar to hubs and the social organizing aspect is certainly similar - but they differ in one key way: our map requires no acceptance/denial of a created link. I feel that because of this difference, most of Boyd's points can't be applied to our map. One thing I guess it does bring up, though, is the importance of defining a "link" in our map. Obviously "friends" in these social networks doesn't actually translate into a true friendship in real life, so we definitely want to make sure the links between organizations on our map are legitimate.