Friends Via Events

Description
This Pattern occurs when user befriends other users, not because they actually are friends or know each other, but because they need to be friends to use other features in the media.

Examples
In facebook, the user has to be friends with the users he wants to invite to the group. Creating a group and inviting temporary colleagues is rendered hard, as the user has to add them as friends first. Thus users tend to become "friends" with other user which they hardly know at all.

Pros and Cons
Depending on what the social media want to accomplish this pattern may be both wanted and unwanted. For example Facebook generally steers its users to become friends with as many other users as possible, thus such a pattern is desired. However, the pattern, may restrain users from communicating in case the users would not want to become friends. In this case the pattern of course is undesired, unless the media does not want its users to communicate.

Relations
The pattern is very dependent on how flexible the software of said social media is. Thus the most strongest relation is the actual software.

Friends Via Events depends very much on how the user is and if she is socially comfortable with befriending said user or not. The pattern is breeding the Unintended Stalking pattern as well as the Befriending Dilemma pattern.

Contributors
Created by Christian Broniewicz