Friending and following

Friending is the act of adding someone to a list of "friends" on a social networking service.^[1][2] The notion does not necessarily involve the concept of friendship.^{[footnotes 1]} It is also distinct from the idea of a "fan"—as employed on the WWW sites of businesses, bands, artists, and others—since it is more than a one-way relationship. A "fan" only receives things. A "friend" can communicate back to the person friending.^[2] The act of "friending" someone usually grants that person special privileges (on the service) with respect to oneself.^[4] On Facebook, for example, one's "friends" have the privilege of viewing and posting to one's "timeline".^[2]

Following is a similar concept on other social network services, such as Twitter and Instagram, where a person (follower) chooses to add content from a person or page to their newsfeed. Unlike friending, following is not necessarily mutual, and a person can unfollow (stop following) or block another user at any time without affecting that user's following status.^[5][6][7]

The first scholarly definition and examination of friending and defriending (the act of removing someone from one's friend list, also called unfriending) was David Fono and Kate Raynes-Goldie's "Hyperfriendship and beyond: Friends and Social Norms on LiveJournal" from 2005,^[8] which identified the use of the term as both a noun and a verb by users of early social network site and blogging platform LiveJournal, which was originally launched in 1999.

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