The subject of this chapter is the key to the success of any community. Your friend features will be the main reason for people to interact with your community. It is also the biggest drive for your users to advertise for you. "Hey Peter, come and check this out. I love it, so will you!"—a friend in a community site, like in life, is someone who you have something in common with, enjoy the company of, or turn to when you have something to discuss. A circle of friends can be thought of as a sub-community within a community.

This chapter will show you how to take advantage of people's nature to congregate around things that they enjoy, find useful, or that intrigue them. We will start this chapter by extending the framework to allow for relationships to be built between our users. We will then add some features that allow our users to locate all of their existing friends, as well as make new friends. Then we will have a discussion about providing real time status updates...