Dodge Caliber is not my friend

Jim Benson picks up a riff on my post below on MySpace in his "Fox ain't so sly":

Ed describes the pollution of too many ads on a page or inserted into too many opportunities. But there is equal or perhaps greater pollution of confusing objects with people. On a social networking site, you will rarely ask Dodge Caliber for a restaurant recommendation or to help with a personal problem.

This improper use of "friend" quickly destroys community - which is all MySpace is there for. If Fox were truly sly, they'd come up with another distinction and make it a game to join as many things to you as you could.

This got me thinking about a new network/blog app I've started to use, Vox, which gives users a chance to build "collections" of objects (books, music, video, photos) and share them as first-class objects in the system. It's not much of a stretch to think of someone enthusiastic about their latest shiny toy to link to a few books about it, record a podcast about it, show a video or photos of them using it. That's not quite the same as being that object's friend, though - friendship on Vox implies a desire to connect not just to one individual item but to a whole stream of new stuff coming from them.

Is it weird to think of items for sale as similar to people? Jim's question about whether your car would give you a restaurant recommendation actually is a worthwhile one - certainly, I'd trust it to tell me about out of the way drive-ins, and there's almost certain some promoter somewhere trying to figure out what the 00's equivalent of the Levi's Jeep or the Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer is. My shoes could be friends with my socks! Her perfume writes an advice column! The dinette set in New Jersey gives you a recommendation for a mover. &c.