There are many aspects to building relationships in any community—real or virtual. First and foremost is initiating contact with the people whom you will eventually call your friends. The easiest way to locate someone who you might want to call a friend is to directly invite the people whom you already know as a friend. We will do this in a few ways.
All of these methods of inviting a friend into the system would of course generate an email invite (and eventually a system based message—see next chapter). The user would have the ability to then follow the link into the system and either sign up or log in to accept the request.
The preceding screenshot shows a sample email that the user would receive...