Matthew, Bertrand and Sylvain are commenting on the aspect of friendship in the context of social networks and blogging. Matthew comes up with an ethical dilemma: "Let's suppose I were to write that I was having an affair or I had beaten up my wife or children today. Would you link to that? Would you comment? Or just ignore the post?". I have a compound answer to this.
First, about the situation he is describing. Should a real friend of mine post such a thing on his weblog, it wouldn't come as a surprise. There's a good chance I would have known about it even before shit happened. So because of friendship's reasons, I will have commented on and discussed about it in real life, and quite likely I will have tried to support my friend in overcoming the situation, should he or she be willing to, or wanting to. Also, the situation isn't quite likely to happen since most of my real friends don't do weblogs or Orkut or whatelse. My partner and I are very lucky to have a small circle of really good friends, and we have recently been confronted with the preciousness of this in a most enriching and supportive way. Thanks, all the people who gave us a call in that week.
If the "friend" however is merely an internet or business acquaintance, somebody I like to hang out with on conference evenings or in public discussion fora, I might still react on the outing, but quite likely I will do that through a small private mail. I might be inclined to post about my general feelings about it on my weblog, but that would serve strictly as a comment or expression of my own values, not as a means to judge that person. In the end, I might also just not care enough about the situation, or be less caring about it than the person would like me to care about it. That would indicate that the person has a different friendship valuation perception as I have.
Related to Matthew's dilemma, I started thinking about different friendship valuations and contexts. I've been talking about this with a real friend quite a while ago. You see people who collect friends easily, and often this is because of a permeable barrier between work and home (and them being enjoyable persons to hang out with, of course). They invite working colleagues over at home, and might still visit friends/ex-colleagues many years after ways of employment parted. I think the old concept of work now easily scales into the larger hemisphere people spend professional time in, like discussion fora, blogs, conferences, and so on. Nothing new here, except that these social software tools might establish friendship links between people prematurely (IMHO).
Other people (like myself), have a more split-personality approach to friends and work. When doing mass-mailings for inviting local Belgian contacts to join us at the Cocoon GetTogether, I have the chance to browse through my contact list. Looking at my Orkut page, I know a fair amount of people, and most of them I'm always looking forward to meeting them in real life. Still, I do feel awkward qualifying all these people as "friends" - and the friendship valuation feature in Orkut is severely lacking in that perspective: they might take a look at what Don is suggesting. There's quite a few nuances that the current social software friendship classification schemata fail to express.
A few of these people however, for reasons of shared-neuroness (which most often isn't expressed in amounts of direct communication!) can easily stand in for real friends, let alone be the distance and real-life disconnectedness be a problem for that. I cannot easily qualify these people. One thing for sure is that I feel at ease when being with them - I like "being with them".
Let me explain that. I'm not as much a people's person as one needs to be. Hm. As I write this, I think I'm touching the core of my issue with "being a people's person". Getting involved with people (which could be friends eventually) means adapting your behaviour to a huge set of intangible socio-cultural Rules, which can be boring, intrusive or inhibitive to genuine contact. If I need to "dress up" my social presence, or simply act better than I am or feel before being able to relate to an acquaintance, I often prefer to stay low and remain in my little social observatory. Because I do love people, but sometimes only as an observator. Yep, I failed to attend the right courses while studying, because otherwise I would have been a sociologist (like my brother), or - godforbid - a shrink, or at the very least been working with people instead of technology.
Some people in this unclassifiable category do hit the sweet spot of not requiring the Rules bullshit, and not expecting more from a friendship than enjoying time together when occasions bring us together. That might not be as involving as the relationship I have with my most precious friends, but it's a very real part of my life, which I cannot easily miss. Anyway - I do hope I've been able in the past to express this special feeling towards certain people in a way they were touched by it - I know I was.
Coming back to Matthew's dilemma, I don't think linking or commenting are tangible expressions of genuine involvement in one-another's life issues - as friends, I mean. In putting your thoughts up on the Internet, you are always, first and foremost, expressing yourself and establishing, reinforcing or shifting your public image as others see it. When I want to interrelate with a real friend, I couldn't care less about my own composure or image: he's a friend after all.