John, this is the same software as on Jan Still's forum (although .2 versions higher), the friends feature, along with a couple of others is for the yoounger crowd; i.e. like facebook and myspace, folks like to have "friends" and keep track of each other; you can see when someone is on-line etc, my little dot on the lower left is green as I am on-line, gray when off line.
I agree when someone asks me to be their friend, but think its a funny feature, showing my age I guess
Ed