What is a friend?
Dave Winer “opines”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/crimson1/whatIsFriendship on the nature of friendship, and comes up with a definition I can agree with. What it doesn’t explain is how friendship reaches this stage, and how it can leave it.
I do think that real friendship always needs an Event to make it happen—a moment when both people get a glimpse of the person within. This often doesn’t happen, even with people one meets every day. Even with family, and people who are sometimes called friends, but really are acquaintances (still wonderful people to know, don’t get me wrong).
Friendship by its nature can be hard to extend to large numbers of people—it takes a very special person to know a large number of people that well, and care equally much for them all. And the caring is what’s important.