Janet Kornblum wrote this USA Today article about the problems many of us are facing in regard to Facebook friending and boundary issues:

Howard Rheingold, a blogger and author of books about online communities, recently sent all his Facebook friends a message reminding them that he doesn’t actually know everyone on his list.

Rather than be selective about whom he accepts as friends, Rheingold and others treat Facebook more as a guestbook, open to nearly everyone who makes a request.

Once you become someone’s friend, you can see a list of his or her friends — and ask those people to be your friend, too. So, for example, if you ask Rheingold to become your friend and he agrees, you can send friend requests to all of Rheingold’s friends.

They might say yes only because they think you know Rheingold, or that he has referred you to them.

Rheingold warned his friends that they “will find that a large network of people who don’t really know me in real life will have some access to information about you.

“If you get friend requests from people who are part of my social graph, please don’t assume that they are actually my friends or that I endorse them,” Rheingold wrote. “If you are not comfortable with the exposure that being a Facebook friend of mine brings to your profile, ‘unfriend’ me — I won’t feel slighted.”