Rating your friends

I sometimes read complaints from people about the all-inclusiveness of online friendships. While it’s okay to avoid friendship with people in real life, it somehow seems much ruder to reject their friend requests on social networking sites like Facebook. So we wind up with long lists of “friends” we don’t necessarily like, or even know in real life. Maybe this is the reason Facebook has so many “judge me” applications. By putting yourself and your friends through these additional hoops, you can establish in-groups even in the all-accepting world of online friendships. You can figure out who really likes you, and make it clear who you really like.

The best examples are applications that allow you to categorize your friends, like Compare People, which lets you label friends as “cutest,” “sexiest,” “funniest,” etc. But it’s very much a rating system, asking you questions like “who would you rather travel with?” and “who is cooler?” and presenting you with two random options from your friend list.

Compare People leads you to the application called Circle of Trust, which I find almost sinister. Going systematically through your friend list, you are asked to rate the trustworthiness of each friend. Then you can find out who trusts you. It would have been a very useful application in junior high, and it’s probably useful now if you’ve got three hundred friends you need to differentiate between.

And just in case you need one final way to determine who your real friends are, you can check out the answers people give about you on Friend Advisor. This app asks you questions about your friends like “How should X dress?” and “What would you advise X about his political views?” Nice, innocuous topics on which to give your friends unsolicited advice, right? But I guess this can help you figure out who your real friends are, i.e. the ones who don’t tell you that you dress like a homeless guy and need to seriously lighten up with the political stuff.

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