Talk:Friends List

"Friends list" or "Livejournal Friends"?

I was just filling in a red link page and got into the whole FRIENDS AND FRIENDING thing. Now I'm wondering if it should actually be divided into "LiveJournal Friends", and this "Friends list" page should be just about the list aspect. Thoughts, anyone?

I think it should be mentioned that friends lists exist not only one livejournal, and that the practice as mentioned in the article refers to LJ and its clones only. I'm not really sure how other social networking sites work, though. -- Rodo 20:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

My thoughts: a general 'friend list' article and a) either do a separate LJ Friends' list article as a subpage, like: Friends list/Livejournal, Friends List/Facebook etc; or b) create LJ fl as a subsection fo this acticle, to which LJ friends article redirects. Why? I think that there is something like a universal friends list dilemma, no matter which social networking site you belong to, and specific lj-related things (being slashdotted=metafandomed, for example?), so there may be reason enough to do both -- as long as someone want to write it. Any social networking sociologists around? :) --Lian 21:15, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Universal Friends List Dilemma is a great way to put it. Why did all the social networking services keep using the dumb term??? It's been clear for at least five years that providing access to locked posts does not equal friendship, nor does watching someone's journal posts. I'm still not clear on whether the issue should be labeled Friends or Friends List or what, but maybe it doesn't really matter. -- Msilverstar 00:41, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Good point, I was so focused on LJ that I forgot about everywhere else, like Facebook and MySpace, which also use the term "Friends" with all the same implications. D'oh! Glad you wrote that note. -- Msilverstar

It's also used on LJ clones, which are not the same as LJ, so even without Facebook, etc. I don't think the topic should be exclusive to LJ. --Kyuuketsukirui 00:53, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

deviantArt also uses the term "friend" in relation to watching other users, though it is more differentiated there as you click "watch this user" and they are then added to your friends list, but you can pick what you want to be notified about, i.e. just deviations (in that site's slang the regular art posts), journal posts, scrap posts, but it has no security measures like f-lock afaik, and is also called deviantWatch. And I think you can list people as "friends" without being notified of their art, but I'm not sure what the friends thing then does, except that there is a paid feature to display your friends' avatars on your profile. Anyway, that site uses the "friend" terminology too.--Ratcreature 22:37, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I think before the detailed explanation there should be a list on which social networks "friend" means that. I don't use MySpace of Facebook so I don't know whether it is the same as on LJ-clones or whether this just talks about LJ, but like I said above, eg dA has friend as term also, but afaik without the privacy levels, so I think that with the article starting with just "on many social networks" it needs to be clear before the details. --Ratcreature 06:44, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking about this earlier, and I think Ratcreature has the right idea: we need to distinguish the uses of `friend' on the various social networks fans use.

Perhaps we should make some subsections that depict what each social network considers the friends list to be used for? --awils1 06:54, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree and have tried to reword the introductory passage accordingly. The described flist features were lj-and-clones features, so I added a header 'On LiveJournal'. Hope that's ok. --lian 08:41, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Hope you didn't mind that I worked with your sentence a bit; made it longer and a little more fluent, I think. Your edits were quite handy :)--awils1 10:31, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

No problem! I just re-added the bit what the terms actually *do* have in common across the different usages. --lian 17:13, 28 November 2008 (UTC)