Friends Indeed?

Stitched Together

We're inventing Friends Next every day.

"For most people, when they thought of their close friends, it was people with whom they would share personal things," says Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist at MIT who has studied online social networks from their beginnings. "What's changing now is that people who are not in the other person's physical life meet in this very new kind of space. It is leaving room for new hybrid forms."

The weirdness of Friends Next is that it comes at you like a melodrama: "Is he married yet?" "Is he still straight?" "She's changed her religious views to 'rain dancing'? I thought she had a cross tattooed on her hip."

"Facebook is more about entertainment than work," says Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and sociologist who studies social networks at Harvard. "Instead of watching soap operas, they're watching soap operas of people they sort of know."

"It sucks you in," says Mary Washington's Clark. "The public conversations -- it's digital eavesdropping."

Losing friends in this new world is as fraught as making them. "Real-world friendships are not usually intentionally ended," Adams says. "Folks just let things naturally cool off. On Facebook, decisive action has to be taken." Defriending cements that a friendship is over.

The best soap operas occur when a couple breaks up. Change your profile from "In a Relationship" to "Single" -- or even more ominously, "It's Complicated" -- and little press releases blast out to all your gossip-hound "friends." Massive e-mailing and tongue-wagging ensues.

It's futile to try to erase latent traces of Friends Next. "The digital trails of an online friendship -- true or not -- really do last forever," Albrechtslund says. Its evidence is stored on servers indefinitely, beyond the control of the persons involved.

While many are still trying to figure out how to make Friends Next work for us, Todd Huffman is trying to harness this new social form to save us.

The Phoenix software developer is creating a company called sStitch. In times of crisis, like the recent San Diego wildfires, Huffman notes, there are vast quantities of useful information buzzing among Friends Next. They turn to their social tech -- text-messaging, blogs, e-mail, Web networks -- to announce: "I'm okay." "I'm evacuating to this city." "This freeway is shut down." "That road is flooded." They send pictures on the fly. Their cellphones' global positioning locates them precisely.

This is all instant bottom-up information from hundreds of thousands of eyes not now available to the people trying to manage the disaster. How great would it be, Huffman thinks, if you could aggregate all that into a comprehensive and sensible God's-eye picture of what's going on that would allow instantaneous and effective response?

Huffman, 28, sees the potential in this because Friends Next is at the heart of his personal life. "I'm one of the first in that generation of people very defined by friends obtained and maintained through social technologies," he says. "Almost all my close friends, I originally met over the Internet. They're very geographically spread out."