Sorry I didn’t read your blog yesterday. I was busy responding to my many friends on Ning, getting down with my fellow avatars in Second Life, tweeting with my Twitter friends and followers, checking out my friends’ Facebook pages and MySpace profiles, and accepting invitations of colleagues on LinkedIn. Somehow, there wasn’t time to cope with content.

With so many friends on so many social networks, it’s all you can do just to accept invitations and keep up with them all. And maybe wonder how you have so many virtual friends on all these networks whom you’ve never spoken to or (in some cases) heard of in real life.

Are you my friend? Why not? You’re probably only a few degrees away from me on LinkedIn (at this writing, I seem to have almost 70 close colleagues, 5,300 at one degree of separation and a whopping 684,400 at two degrees—with nearly 12,000 added just in the last week). What? I’m not good enough to be your friend?

Most of the first paragraph is a lie. I dropped out of Ning after finding out that I didn’t know most of my “friends” and apparently needed to spend hours there to make sense of it all. Twitter didn’t let me drop out: I’m still being “friended” every couple of weeks by people who are so close to me they don’t read my blog. If they did, they’d know I don’t Twitter anymore. I’ve never joined Facebook or MySpace; Orkut and Second Life are distant memories.

Of course, I’m a crotchety introvert who doesn’t want to spend time friending people I don’t know, or being friended by them. I’m not even wild about using “friend” as a verb.

I see three issues here:

First, the word “friend” has been hopelessly debased in social networking. I’d never heard of most of the people who wanted to be my friend on Ning: Even “casual acquaintance” would be way too strong. One librarian blogger (liblogger), who is active in several networks, noted that 80% of those who add her as friends are people she doesn’t know—and she wonders whether she’s offending them by failing to reciprocate.

Second, there are too many social networks, and they all make it so easy to friend people. I’m seeing a growing number of liblog posts from people suffering social network burnout.

Third—and most insidious—the scenario in the first two paragraphs isn’t outrageous. Most social networks reward those who take them seriously. That means investing serious time in them. When I wonder why I don’t see much benefit from a network, the response I get is consistent: You’re not spending enough time there. The net can be a time-sink under the best of circumstances. Too many social networks (particularly those with chat components) can take over your life.

I see encouraging signs of sanity. Not on the “friend” issue— it’s not clear that changing terms would make much difference. But one liblogger says, “I use social software when it makes something I already do easier.” A library columnist notes the value of trying social networks out—and the importance of dropping them if they aren’t useful to you. One blogger notes her reason for not liking instant messaging: “It gives people instant access to my time, and I can think of very few people who deserve that instant access.”

When Mr. Rogers asked tens of millions of kids to be his friend, he probably wasn’t asking whether they’d loan him money—but as one commenter on a “defriending” post noted, that’s not a bad way to define a real friend. Library blogger Steve Lawson calls social-network friends “imaginary friends.” Maybe that’s right. The social thingy I find most intriguing at the moment—a password-protected Meebo Room—doesn’t use the term “friend” yet, though I do consider some of the folks in that room to be friends (or at least treasured acquaintances).

I haven’t dropped out of all social networks, and I don’t plan to. I have a fair number of friendly acquaintances I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Are they people I’d be willing to lend money to or borrow from? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but they’re not strangers either. Still, I keep the number of networks pretty low and am chary of invitations. I do need time to read your content, create my own, and get out into that amazing 3D environment with surround sound and natural fragrances, the one where walking actually burns calories.