Meanwhile, back in the land of Facebook, a new widget has arrived to bother the peasantry. Not long ago, a little box appeared in the corner of Facebook pages. It's entitled “People you may know,” and it contains the names and faces of people that Facebook thinks you might recognize but haven't yet added to your list of “friends.”

The results it coughed up for me were strikingly accurate – but perhaps not in the way that Facebook had intended. My reaction was the same as the reaction of everyone I've spoken to: Yes, I know many of those faces you're showing me. And yes, there's a reason I haven't added them to my list of friends. Because they're not my friends.

Social networks are famous for employing the term “friendship” loosely, but here we hit a wall. If you need a computer program to remind you who your friends are, they're probably not really your friends.

It's been a long plunge to the bottom of the barrel. The conceit of social networks is that users first accrue a list of “friends,” and then proceed to have fun with them. These lists may have started out with actual friends, but they quickly expanded to encompass people we don't necessarily know, people we do know but don't necessarily like, and people who aren't necessarily real people.

And now Facebook is trying to foist upon us people whom we likely want nothing to do with. Are we at the point when the legions of people who have been involuntarily “friended” will start pushing back?

As it happens, the iffy business of “friending” people is about to come into starker relief than ever. The big news lately is that MySpace, Facebook and Google have announced plans to spread their tentacles across the Web. This means that, among other things, the list of friends that you've so meticulously assembled on MySpace or Facebook – or maybe even your Gmail address book – will suddenly come into play on other sites.

So far these are just announcements, but the players are starting to line up allies. MySpace's lineup includes Yahoo, Twitter and eBay. What does this mean? Updating a MySpace profile photo, for instance, could update a profile photo on its partner sites, too. Facebook, in a somewhat feeble response, has lined up the news-sharing site Digg, where it promises to show you the stories that are popular among your friends. Google, meanwhile, is proposing a system that will allow any website to add social-networking features.

Needless to say, none of these systems are promising to work with each other. In other words, if things keep up this way, people will have to choose which affiliated network they'll make their friends on. The Internet would get hived off into regions that cater only to “friends” made on certain services. How delightfully anachronistic: Imagine if cellphones only connected to people you'd a) designated as friends, and b) were friends on the same network as you.

It would all be just another annoying business tactic if the social networks weren't so busy trying to redefine the word “friendship” downward as fast as they can. The more generic the word becomes, the better it suits them. After all, they derive their power from the size of the “social graph” of who-knows-whom, and the reigning consensus seems to be that the quantity of these links is more valuable than the quality. This is why we see Facebook dredging through its database and pushing us to expand our lists.

Online “friendship” seems to make some people go a little frothy at the lips, convinced that their children are living out an anti-social, Internet-addled existence. But kids these days are smarter than that, and I get the sense that nobody is more keenly aware of the ridiculousness of social-network “friending” than those who take part in it.

This might be why I'm hearing more and more reports of people pruning back their Facebook lists, so that their list of friends lines up more closely with their real understanding of the word. These days, a list of 1,000 “friends” looks more dubious than impressive.

Social networks might have provoked a lot less eye-rolling from their users if they'd gone with the word “contacts” instead of “friends.” But friendship is a potent idea, and it was the allure of collecting real friends that got the ball rolling on social networking in the first place. Little did we realize that the ball was unstoppable, and would career over us like an Indiana Jones boulder, crashing off into the undergrowth.

There will always be those for whom an obscenely large friends list is appealing. But as social networks emerge from their current adolescence into mature communications tools, their users will be ever less interested in “friendship” at all costs. Users will be more interested in having fewer contacts, more clearly categorized. Social networks may have appropriated the term “friendship,” but they won't succeed in debasing it. Their users know what the word means, and sooner or later they're going to want it back.