Friendly vs Friends

I was reading an interesting post on professionalism. It got me thinking about friendly vs. friends and what has happened to the word "friend" in our social media-centric society.

How many friends do you have on Facebook? Now how many of them are actually friends? I left Facebook earlier this year, but I certainly know that my contacts were full of co-workers, students, family members, acquaintances and a small handful of actual friends.

Maybe friend is a word we throw around a little too easily (sort of like "love"). Who is a friend in my world? Someone that I can call / email / text just to check in. Someone I go out of my way to visit. Someone I would call if something really good or really bad happened in my life.

And that list is a small one. A couple people from university that I'm still in touch with. A handful of people I met at work. Someone I met in an organization I used to run. And some of my family members (but definitely not all).  

And that's it. So who is everyone else? They are family, co-workers, students, acquaintances. And I'm happy to be friendly with them; but at the end of the day neither of us is going to call the other in the middle of the night (and that's probably a good thing).