Friends Indeed?

Some encounters can be novel and strange. Jessica Smith, 23, remembers the time someone she'd never heard of from Vassar tried to friend her. It happened when Smith was an undergraduate at George Washington University and had just started dating her boyfriend, Peter. Turned out the stranger was Peter's ex.

"There was nothing friendly about this," she says. "She only wanted to know about me." When Smith didn't fall for this probe -- like it was the ex's business how cute she might be, or clever -- "a friend of hers friended me. Like that would trick me -- 'Ooo, a new friend from Vassar!' It was weird. Really creepy." Before social networks, "she wouldn't have called me, or written me a letter."

Worlds Colliding

You know all those separate lives you lead? When you're not being the FTC lawyer, or the hair-metal band freak, you're the wife of a glassblower and mother of two who likes to spend every vacation she can on the black-sand beaches of Dominica?

Forget about keeping those lives neatly partitioned in Friends Next.

"It's the postmodern nightmare -- to have all of your selves collide," says Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who edits Personal Relationships, the journal of the International Association for Relationship Research.

In villages of the agrarian age, you wouldn't even have developed those various personalities. In Friends Next you can't escape them. "If you really welcome all of your friends from all of the different aspects of your life and they interact with each other and communicate in ways that everyone can read," Adams says, "you get held accountable for the person you are in all of these groups, instead of just one of them."

This became dramatically clear in September 2003, on an early site called Friendster. Two 16-year-old students approached a young San Francisco teacher with two questions: Why do you do drugs, and why are you friends with pedophiles? So reports danah boyd, a PhD candidate at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information who has become renowned for her research into online social networks, and who insists on rendering her name without capital letters.

The teacher's profile was nothing extraordinary or controversial. Her picture showed her hiking. But she had a lot of friends who were devotees of Burning Man -- the annual week-long festival in the Nevada desert that attracts tens of thousands of people experimenting with community, artwork, self-expression, self-reliance, absurdity and clothing-optional revelry.

"The drug reference came not from her profile but from those of her Friends, some of whom had signaled drug use (and attendance at Burning Man, which for the students amounted to the same thing)," boyd writes. "Friends also brought her the pedophilia connection -- in this case via the profile of a male Friend who, for his part, had included an in-joke involving a self-portrait in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and testimonials about his love of young girls. The students were not in on this joke."

In Friends Next, all your lives and circles of relationships are collapsed. Extreme cases of friend mash-ups resemble the barroom scene in "Star Wars."

"You can be friends with someone you know well and don't like," reports Susannah Clark, a sophomore at the University of Mary Washington. "You read their profiles and blogs and are well aware of their life. It's a love-to-hate type arrangement."

"I even agreed to be one person's friend because he's so psychotic I was scared of what would happen if I said no," writes blogger Dan Kaufman.