What is a friend?

Facebook. I was snoopbooking today (credit to my R/L mate Chris for this phrase). I looked up an Australian journalist and then ‘viewed his friends’, which included other journalists, in-house marketing people and other people (we have to assume that these were his friends). I was tempted to add many of them but I hesitated…what if this person actually uses Facebook as a way of networking with people that he considers to be his friends. Am I, as a PR person, a friend? I remember thinking twice about adding clients of mine as friends, fearing that Facebook was blurring the line between my personal and professional lives. Might this journalist object to a PR adding him as a friend. There were other PRs there but maybe they were real friends. Would we always have to ignore the fact that he had rejected my advances. I imagined us making light of it over a coffee at the next CeBIT. Maybe I’m insecure, maybe I’m paranoid but I think there is a strong case for social media applications to build in more scope for defining the nature of individual relationships and providing access to information that relates to that specific network. I might want to share information about my agency or my clients with a journalist but I don’t necesarily want him seeing the picture of me at 5am on a Sunday morning. Facebook would need new ‘fields’ relating to work but then it would straddle personal and professional networks (currently covered – for most people – by LinkedIn).