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It doesn’t matter what you call it (or does it?), but these days some of us are plagued with too many ‘Facebook friends’. By this I mean we have accepted a ‘friend’ request on one of the many social networks that we joined last year from someone we don’t really know, and are unlikely to have anything to do with, and now get a constant stream of unwanted invitations, meaningless notifications and status updates.

This got me wondering, what does a ‘friend’, ‘contact’, or ‘connection’ actually mean? And should we add people to our personal address book, when for many the implied relationship is little more than an acknowledgment of “yes, we know each other”.

For my part I view Facebook as a ’social network’. That is one where I am mostly connected with Friends and Family and people I know at a social level; while Xing, LinkedIn, and a few dozen other web2.0 sites I’ve joined, are mainly for ‘business connections’. Clearly the boundaries are blurred and I have business relationships with friends, and friends on these business network sites who are not on Facebook; but I usually try to keep these separate - after-all we don’t want to bore everyone with our web-chatter, even if this is your biggest passion in life.

I realise this distinction is transient and that Facebook once had a ‘how do you know this person’ feature which they have sidelined; but for now I prefer to keep things as black and white as possible.

However, as business connections start to invade our social space and in anticipation of the future problem this will create, I’m thinking about putting my ‘friends’ into some useful and meaningful categories. Why? Well it should allow me to maintain a better relationship with them, and more importantly not spam them with unwanted notifications and updates. So towards this end I have come up with the following categories:

• Friends and family - my real friends
• Suppliers - actual and potential
• Buyers - actual and potential
• Advisers - for information, advice & / or support
• Colleagues - current and ex (school, university, work, etc. We had a shared time based experience, but that’s all)
• Social - everyone else I know and might meet socially
• Others - I can’t recall how we connected, but I’m not deleting you just yet

Although this is still a work in progress, I feel it starts to address one of my concerns with social networks; namely how do I manage my connections in a way that adds real value to my time and network activity.

Putting these categories aside for a second; what I find interesting is what these names say about the nature of connection and in particular the level of implied activity between you and them. Distinctions such as these may not be that important today, but when social networks take over more of our lives, by adding the commercial transactions that will ultimately justify their existence, these categories will become more important. Maybe I should adopt a ‘folksonomy‘ that helps index my contacts and conveys our relationship at the same time. So how about, rather than simply calling someone a ‘friend’, ‘contact’, or ‘connection’; why not call them a: drinking buddy, team mate, lover, soul-mate, co-workers, school mates, etc. or are these too American to be universally acceptable?