Web 2.0 - the term has been used and abused so that it has many different meanings. (And of course O'Reilly thinks they own it, which is ridiculous on its face. That's a rant for another post I guess.)

Is it a web site with big fonts and pastel colors? Is it web sites that use Ajax? Web sites that rely on users to submit content (crowd sourcing)? Web sites that don't charge money but simply rely on advertising? It's many different things I suppose.

One thing I've noticed about Web 2.0 is the idea that you have "friends". On twitter, I have followers. On digg, I have friends and fans. I have facebook friends and secondlife friends. People subscribe to my RSS feed of this blog. And it goes on and on.

One unexpected consequence of this is watching the natural decay of friends. That is, you start losing friends. Its a weird phenomenom. But one day you think to yourself, "Gee, I wonder what's up with Sally? I haven't heard from her in a while". And then you go onto Facebook to see her profile, and realize she's not in your friends list any more. She's defriended me!

I myself trim my friends list from time to time. For instance, I met someone at a conference once. They added me as a friend on Facebook the next day. I accepted. And then a year later I haven't heard from them even once, and they Facebook profile is largely empty (abandoned even). I then decide to remove them as a friend. Someone I met once, who could have become friends with but didn't, doesn't need to see my family picnic pictures on Facebook.

But I have elementary and high school people I haven't talked to in 20 years adding me to Facebook as well. So obviously there's a different standard for those people being "friends" versus people I have talked to only once.

It's an interesting culture of online friends we are living in. You can track who considers you a friend, and notice when they no longer consider you a friend. Quite brutal actually.