What Does a Connection Mean in a Social Network?

I weighed into this discussion around a piece by Peter Caputa IV on What Does a Connection Mean in a Social Network?.

My contribution:

"It seems to me that in addition to distinguishing between directionalities, one can further differentiate two broad strata of networked social connectivity:

1) declarative. the explicit permissions that a person gives to others to interact with their online identity (i.e. allow commenting/content sharing/wiki-style content co-creation etc.) and the FOAF-like explicit categorisation of others as 'friends'

2) organic. the actual interactions that person is involved in within the network (i.e. linking or being linked to, commenting, messaging, content sharing, content co-creation, rating etc.)

So (1) is focused on the explicit definition of relationship with others (it construes 'inter-personal' relationships between a separate 'I' and 'you'), whereas (2) arises out of the organic web of interactions between people (the 'trans-personal' aspect of relationships—a fluid interaction of 'I's together). In other words, there's a difference between describing one's relationship with others and the actual, organic nature of the relationship itself. It seems to me that this has implications for FOAF portability between social networks, in that (2) is only coherent within the context of specific networks (whether that's an SNS or the web as a whole) with their unique interactive structures. So is a portable FOAF in effect perhaps an expression of the declarative aspects of relationships between people that can be abstracted from any specific social network context?"