Scott Rosenberg points out that Facebook’s categories of friendship are useful if you’re nineteen years old, but not so much if you’re a grownup. Here are the possible answers to “How do you know [this friend]?”
- Lived together
- Worked together
- From an organization or team
- Took a course together
- From a summer / study abroad program
- Went to school together
- Traveled together
- In my family
- Through a friend
- Through Facebook
- Met randomly
- We hooked up
- We dated
- I don’t even know this person
He’s absolutely right: a minute or two of doodling on my desk pad, and I came up with the following additional choices:
- My neighbor
- Through church/mosque/synagogue/temple/coven/…
- We are in the same profession [we might be in the same “organization,” and we might not]
- [This friend] is my lawyer/clergyman/doctor/accountant/child’s teacher/psychotherapist/taxidermist/…
- I am [this friend’s] customer
- [This friend] is my customer
And to be really useful, the information has to be even more specific than that. In my PDA Contacts app, I use one of the user-defined fields to keep track of what theater project I know somebody from. So that if I forget that I know Lori K. because she was the producer for Forum in 2001, my organizer won’t.