BuddyPress.org

Wessa-

Thanks for your comments. I too always thought it a bit odd to get friendship requests from someone I never met.

This, of course, is not specific to BuddyPress. Friending is a common practice in the 1st-generation social networking platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and others. Many platforms that followed basically carried this metaphor forward.

However, I think it is time to evolve the friending process. We can pay homage to the throwback years of early social networking platforms, but going forward, we need to expand our relationship definitions.

Are you proposing that the requests also come through with the relationship reference attached.. for example “Wessa would like to add you as an acquaintance”

For the alpha release of this component, I am focusing on remapping of the friend relationship. So, the request for friendship would come in and be accepted or rejected as always. If accepted, the users would have a choice to remap that relationship to something more appropriate. Of course, this means that each party in the relationship could remap the relationship differently.

For the official release, version 1.0, it is possible that I will hook into the actual relationship-requesting process and pass on the request as proposed–x would like to add you as a colleague. This way, both parties would in essence be agreeing to the type of relationship.