There is something right about this. I personally find having to ‘like’ things and ‘friend’ people — or not, as the case may be — pretty skeevy, if not downright juvenile.
It’s why I choose to use Twitter instead of Facebook. On Twitter, one simply ‘follows’ someone’s feed or ‘retweets’ one of their tweets — neither of which implies ‘liking’ something your ‘friend’ said.
To translate this into Facebookish: I ‘like’ Twitter and have accepted its ‘friend’ request — ugh.
So, there’s something right about trying to give Facebook users some flexibility beyond ‘liking’, ‘friending’, and displaying one’s ‘relationship status’ online. A little ambiguity can be useful (and no, I’m not talking about changing one’s relationship status to ‘it’s complicated’).
That said, what’s really needed is to get beyond simple dichotomies. Adding an ‘enemy’ feature to balance out the ‘friend’ feature still buys in to the simplistic notion that people are one or the other. Most of the time, that’s simply not true.