Also! I haven't done it here, only at the other board I'm on where privacy/security is a lot more important, but if you create a private photo album your friends should be able to view the photos that the general membership shouldn't be able to see. It's one of those steps for any features that require security permissions. On my other board, we also have a blogging feature and a lot of the members marked it as private. This board has a HUGE membership, so there was a mad scramble to add everyone as friends so no one would be left out who usually read the private journals from the old board format. Obviously that's not the case on this board, but it has the same basic features.

And it's nice to have all the userid's that I PM or enjoy reading posts from all in one spot. When looking through all of their profiles, I read their friends and might come across someone else that I would enjoy getting to know as well.

One thing that was a problem at the other board... there were already issues with people thinking cliques were forming. Some folks were upset about not having a lot of "friends" and were feeling left out. Don't let the name fool you. It's just what they call it. As Mike said, add some folks to your friendslist and don't take things personally if you don't have a lot of requests or you might even get some denied (over there, getting denied was simply that the person didn't know the person requesting a friendship and didn't want them to have access to their private journal and photos until they got to know them). Some will even go unanswered. It's taken a while for folks to see that I've sent them a request and some still haven't responded. It's just as bad, if not worse for the social groups. It's just going to take some time for folks to get used to all the new features and notifications.