Why Friendships are Money
Just as most of you I have been following Reinier’s posts on trust with a lot of interest. Especially his theory on the fact that “a single Reddit vote has been reduced to 0% trustworthiness” has really inspired me to think about online communities and the relationships that they supposedly forge. It got me thinking of the problem that Deborah Schultz presented about her having 3000 relations (not friends), and the fact that the average (!) person on MySpace has 30 ‘friends’. I just can’t believe that all these people are friends!
I don’t have 3000 friends, mainly because I simply don’t have the time to maintain that many friendships. Maintaining a friendship in real life takes time, and because my time is limited it is fairly impossible to maintain an unlimited amount of friends. Even more, a real friendship has a certain minimum threshold of time that is required to maintain the relationship, meaning that maintaining even 300 friends is something I consider impossible. So why are there so many people in online networks claiming to have 3000 friends?! There is a clear disconnect here between the meaning of on-line and off-line friendship.
The problem with current online social networks is that it’s a bit too easy to make people your friends. This leads to the ability to make “friendships” with a theoretically unlimited amount of people, and the only way to maintain this is to lower the value of a friendship. Much like with money and products, the more there is of it the lower the value will become. The online social networks, in their attempt to please their users, have therefore decreased the value of friendship to a virtual zero.
So lets take these networks back to the drawing board and have a look at what makes offline friendships valuable. As I stated before it takes time to manage and maintain friendships, and therefore you don’t have that many real friends. Even better: as you move through life your and move house, change school, or switch jobs you will be losing certain friends and gaining others. Losing contact with “old friends” can be a painful thing as it is a lost investment in the time you spent to maintain the relationship.
The point of this story is that creating and maintaining a friendship costs time, and as time is money to most of us we can conclude that friendship is a really valuable investment: in other words friendships are money! And since online communities with their boolean relationships (== every relationship is as valuable as the other) offer you unlimited friendships we have now come to a online society where these friendships don’t offer any value.
The task for current and future social websites is to start creating networks that are about the quality of your relations and not the quantity. It might be reasonable to say that having online friends in a network should take time. In fact this is actually already happening as I for example have quite a few “friends” in my Facebook that I never talk to and don’t consider friends, but maybe we can take this one step further and have an online friendship dissolve to “zero” in time when the interactivity between the “friends” weakens.
If a network would implement this loss, it would create a real incentive to invest time in your friendships. Again, as time is money you are actually investing money in your friendship, and maybe it is an idea to offer the option some people to pay for their friendships when they don’t have enough time (although I think we are going in a weird direction here if we allow people to “buy their friends”, as people are already ‘buying’ friendship now by posing half nude or making an idiot out of themselves just to rack up MySpace friends).
We can conclude that having online friendships should be a valuable investment. Obviously this investment can be good for yourself as you create a network of trust and therefore increase the value of the group. It is clear that ‘declaring’ someone as a friend just doesn’t count as being a true friendship, and it actually devalues the concept of friendship. I am looking forward to the next generation of online social networks that will be focusing on trust, friendship and non-boolean relationships. There sure is a lot of work to be done, but I am an optimist so I am sure some bright mind (Reinier?, Alper?) will already be thinking about some possible implementations.
