Check out this article what I mean is really clear :

http://www.buraak.com/2008/09/16/is-your-information-safe-with-social-networks/

In our offline social relations there are natural, inherent order, priorities and hierarchy that are predicated on our common and shared perceptions of acquaintance, closeness, intimacy and friendship. These formed over time and are always context based.

college friend that became a close friend as the year progresssed. People I’ve met while traveling and now IMing occasionally. Blog buddies. Ex colleagues that used to be fairly close but now have faded out. Friends of friends, gym buddies, the women who does my hair, family, bosses, neighbours, my thesis supervisor, high school mates I haven’t heard from in years….

These people used to have a clear place and role in my life. My relationships with them are defined by context. There are (or were) time and place and form for these relationships, or simply put, there was a clear context to all of my strong and weak, close and remote relationships and these contexts are now somewhat gone.

All of these people are now my ‘friends’ on facebook. All in one flat, context-blind place – in addition to 25 people I don’t even know. At all.

Now that our online and offline lives are fully intertwined we need more and better tools to organise the online. These tools must better reflect the dynamics and contexts of our offline social lives. As much as there are natural organisation, contexts, priorities and various degrees of friendships offline, we should be able to have these online as well.

and still with me after! as I was kidding.
there is not way that they will rewrite Internet history/practice.

To your point, I agree with the social informatics perspective, which I was more-or-less espousing. Facebook is a contested place, but I think it is sill for FB to think they can direct a specific use and users will hop to. I doubt that anyone high up in the company actually thinks that, regardless of the marketing copy. Facebook’s power lies exactly where you describe – in the use of programmatic controls to shape the network.

I’ll be interested to see where this goes. There’s something important here – Facebook’s rejection of the moniker. The question is – can they?

I probably should have spent a bit longer on my post, but let me clarify and probe a bit:

For me what is interesting about this issue doesn’t stem from a desire to put people into particular friendship categories, but rather to be able to describe what kinds of connection practices users are engaging in on the site.

It’s a very hard thing to measure, but I think it’s worthwhile (at least for me!) to try to learn how people are using the site in order to better understand the link between practices and outcomes (such as social capital). Because of the way online and offline practices blend, I agree that may be misguided to see these two contexts as dichotomous.

And yes, Facebook’s attempt to control user behavior may be futile, but a social shaping perspective articulates the ways in which the technology/medium and the users/society shape one another. Thus while policy edicts per se might not make much of a difference, other acts (shutting down these accounts, capping network size) will shape user behavior in some ways, no?