Since a few years ago, the act of requesting or accepting friendship on a social network, such as Facebook or Tweeter, has been going under the name of “friending.” Googling for it yields all sorts of interesting entries, an increasingly large proportion of which is rather disparaging. To wit, many people now feel that friending is devaluing friendship. Most friends on social networks are not friends at all. Actually, an ever-larger proportion of them are complete strangers, whose mysterious names and pictures only add insult to injury. Thus it is not surprising that friending is starting to irk people far and wide. Ungainly as it is, the term is not entirely useless, though. Most important, it points at the lunacy of expanding social networks. So, hail to friending! With some luck it may even save friendship from complete demise. And it is high time, too.