Are you my friend yes or no ?

"The new social software turbo-charges friendships, sexual hookups and the business of human relationship -- and could turn our lives into an open book. Part 1 of a two-part series." Marc and Joi compete in this Salon.com article about social software (be warned if you are not a subscriber you can view the article but after a very long full page video ad... still it is worth it).

I have never even tried to compete with them with my 413 Linked In friends (which is the one I use the most, almost daily), I should use Orkut more, I only have 71 friends there :=)

The question is what is a friend ?

Good question. Both travel getting cheaper and the Internet of course gets us all closer. We used to have school friends (we still have) because it was the only way to find friends, the local way.

I like this new way of finding friends as I have met extraordinary people (more through my blog that is also social software of course) that I would have never met otherwise, but the first thing I want is of course to meet them in reality, and this is why I enjoy the blogger dinners.

I guess my new definition of a friend is somebody I share a lot of common interests or passions, they can be business or personal passions. Therefore many people with passion about blogging are my (new) friends. I probably have to blog about kite surfing (I don't have the time) to find new friends around but these friends I actually prefer to find them on the beach where I do kite surfing.

I guess social software is really helpful to gather people with the same business or personal interests that would not meet easily without it.

Now I am not sure I would change my orkut profile like Marc did to "open mariage" (I would not anyway, righ :=) even for fun. Of course it says something about you and if I had an open mariage which is not the case, I guess I would not show it to all my contacts...

What is your definition of a friend ?