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Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.

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Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you".

Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.

I agree. Now change the tile of this article to, "A distant friend died two years ago and I didn't know about it." And no one clicks.

I don't see the point of this. Isn't distant friend a subset of "friend" as a group? This seems unnecessarily cynical about the title of this post.

There's emotional distance and there's physical distance. I have been very close to people who are now very far from me. The fact that we don't get to speak often these days says nothing about the quality of the bond. Still very sad...

BOOL: type specifier incorrect

Your whole life you meet new and interesting people. Some you're close friends with for a while, but life takes you your own separate ways. When you meet years later, often you wonder how you were friends. But a few, you can pick up the conversation just like it was yesterday. They're still close friends - it's just the contact that's intermittent; life gets in the way.

Maybe not your friend today, but how about your friend from yesteryear? I reach out periodically to old friends that I have absolutely no contact with (no Facebook, no nothing) just to see how they are doing and reminisce, and they do the same.

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