Nice to delete you

Erica George knows a lot of people. Her Friendster.com account shows that she has 126 friends.

``I'm fairly loose with who I add as a friend there," she says. ``That's because I don't take Friendster terribly seriously."

What she does take seriously is whether to drop a friend from her list, which she calls ``defriending."

``It's definitely a sticky issue for me because I don't want to be rude and just dropping a person seems rude," says George, who is 27. ``We haven't really evolved the social norms for dealing with that yet."

Social networking sites such as Friendster.com, MySpace.com, and Facebook.com help us add new faces to our everyday lives, but the sites are also creating new social and potentially awkward situations both on line and off. What if someone requests to be added as your ``friend" on the site and you don't feel quite the same way? What if a classmate on Facebook purges you from her online roster of friends and you run smack into her in the hallway?

Whether out of cyber courtesy or an attempt to collect as many instant friends as possible , online social butterflies sometimes end up with a growing list of acquaintances and even strangers.

Some people refer to Friendster as ``Acquaintancer" because of the unfamiliar friendly faces they have impulsively approved on their profiles. Some have called it ``Dumpster," after they were suddenly dismissed online by their so-called friends.

The adding and subtracting of virtual friends makes users -- and at least one site, Orkut.com -- ask themselves: ``Who do you know?"

George, for one, doesn't know the answer to that question. Her Friendster account is part of a group called ``Somerville," meaning that anyone in that group profile is connected to her as a ``friend" and has access to her page. George -- who uses Friendster to keep track of former roommates, neighbors, and childhood friends who are no longer in her daily life -- is thinking of sending a news bulletin on Friendster to let her contacts know she's going to clean up her friends list and explain why.

There's a reason for her consideration. One time, a ``friend" on livejournal.com , a site used for blogging and socializing, didn't add her to a new profile.

``For a while, I was a little offended," George says. ``I know that there are some people who, if they dropped me, I might not even notice it. There are others, though, where I think I'd feel pretty hurt or offended. There can be some drama. People can be upset."

There are more than 100 million member profiles on MySpace, with 6 million new members added each month, a company spokeswoman said. Friendster, launched in 2002, has more than 30 million users. A 2005 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 11 percent of Internet users use online social or professional networking sites such as Friendster or LinkedIn , which is geared toward professionals.

The idea is to be part of an online community that connects people through a network of friends of friends. They are akin to online happy hours for people to meet, chat, and find others with shared interests. Adding someone to your profile gives that person access to your friends as well as your personal information, which could include the name of your school, your hometown, your dating preferences, the name of your employer, and your hobbies.

You may feel like you've become instant online buddies with them, without ever having met them in person. But often the users find themselves with a cyber photo album of faces and profiles they don't know well or even at all.

The sites have set up filters and privacy options so that members can seriously weigh who to add to their lists, but they don't offer online etiquette tips on how to gently deny or ``defriend" someone. On MySpace and Facebook, users can limit access to a profile or blog by giving someone the privilege of being an ``added friend," while on Orkut a person has to have a Google account to sign up or be invited by another member. Friendster prompts its members to enter the person's full name or e-mail address and ``to continue only if you really are friends" with that person you want to befriend.

Maureen Raab , an Amherst etiquette expert, suggests that online minglers err on the side of caution about whom they allow onto their friends lists. She suggests that if you don't know the person and don't want to add him or her to your list, just ignore the request or add a privacy setting to your profile, something her 25-year-old brother does.

``It's very awkward. Common sense says I am here to talk to my friends and to catch up with how my old girlfriend is doing," says Raab, who teaches etiquette classes through her website, www.partypuzzle.com. ``It's akin to knocking on someone's door or opening a phone book and calling someone. This sort of exchange has some safety concerns. There's a chance of misrepresentation."

Alex Gonzalez, 31, hasn't figured out a polite way to drop some ``friends" from his Friendster account, even though he doesn't regularly talk to some of the 80 people on his profile. For now, he's letting them stay on his account because he doesn't want the uncomfortable situation of running into them in public if he ``defriends" them.

``I use it religiously to keep up with people and vice versa," says Gonzalez, who lives in the South End. ``This is a small town, and one wants to keep the peace as much as possible."

Deborah Finn, who lives on Beacon Hill, joined Friendster three years ago ``to give people a landing place for anyone I knew who was on. It was a tiny little amenity I could offer my friends in common." She uses LinkedIn to stay in touch with fellow IT consultants and Orkut for meeting new friends for social activities. With each of those services, she gets the unwelcome call to be added to a stranger's profile. And sometimes that can be weird, she says.

``You get new social realities, and sometimes the old etiquettes can be stretched to accommodate the new reality and sometimes they can't," she says. ``Online culture has forced us to put things into words that you don't need to do in real life. If you link to everyone as a friend, you are linking to nobody as a friend. If you can't tell someone to back off with your body language, you have to write a curt note and say `I don't know you.' "

She is particularly careful with LinkedIn, because her associations there are job-related. An employer may interpret a link with someone as an approval of that person's abilities. ``If you're not really acquainted firsthand with the person's work and you are not willing to endorse their work, you should not be linking directly," Finn says. ``On a number of occasions, I've had to write a polite note and say, `I don't feel I have a firsthand knowledge of the work you do.' "

She says she wishes Friendster and other sites would change the term ``friend" when it applies to online relationships. `` `Friend' is a serious thing. Friendship is a serious commitment and a high calling, and there are many degrees of friendliness that are not quite up to the demand of friendship. Sometimes I wish they used some other word, like `buddy.' I think we have a lot of buddies, but a true friend is a demanding role."

Johnny Diaz can be reached at jodiaz@globe.com.