Steve Hodson, whose Winextra probably doesn’t get the attention that it deserves — it is an excellent blog and you should subscribe to it right now (go on, I’ll wait) — ranted a little on the Friend Economy yesterday and it got me thinking about “friends” in general that you might or might not make, as Web2.0 sites proliferate.

With the increased (personal) adoption of Twitter and Friendfeed, I’m getting the chance of “friending” a whole *lot* of people that I’ve never even seen or heard. In some respects this is a good thing, as I am getting the chance to meet more and more bloggers that don’t get the publicity that some of the larger blogs (or the linklove therein).

On the other hand — blindly “adding” them to your friend list also means increasing the noise to ratio level in your friend “stream” no matter what kind of service you’re using., since you don’t *actually* “know” many of these folks yet.

And for some of you out there who actually have “real” friends (as much as you can have a friend in cyberspace), all the noise starts drowning out the signal after a while. I mean, that’s been my experience.

So what’s the best way to get around this?

Well, I think its one thing to do is re-friend people who are friending you carefully, and actually starting a dialogue with folks you actually find interesting (have things in common, and so on); the downside, unfortunately, is that its painfully slow and quite frankly, in VC parlance, it doesn’t scale well.

But you know what?

I think that’s ok.

Because meaningful relationships only happen when you take the time to actually meet, understand, and connect with people. And there’s a lot of good in that.

And I don’t mean, the feel good “Good” that requires everyone to join hands and sing Kumbaya. I think we’re all a little too pragmatic for that. Let’s also include the following phrase after “there’s a lot of good in that”:

… “it helps you network.”

Networking leads to all manner of *other* Good Things, but that’s the topic of another post. Suffice it to say, I think that used properly, the Friending Economy doesn’t *always* need to be bankrupt, or necessarily inflationary (but it can be, see Steve’s post), and it can lead to meeting a whole lot of interesting, and potentially important people — if used correctly.

Who knows if you’ll meet your next business parter, or business client, or next boss, or new best friend through Twitter, Friendfeed, (or Facebook) or any one of these services? You could — but I think its important to slow down to find them, because they might be passing you right by.