In Southern California, everyone is your friend:

In Los Angeles ‘friend’ can mean business associate, someone you know, someone you met once, a guy you’ve had a couple of email exchanges with….Truly, people never say “I know someone over at Warner Brothers” it’s always “I have a friend at Warner Brothers”. It’s never “I know that director” it’s “that director is a friend of mine”. Upon my first brush with this practice it irked me as I saw it as fake and disingenuous. I assumed that people were bragging about who they knew and embellishing the truth. However over time I came to realize that that wasn’t actually the case, at least not entirely. The word really has a different meaning here. When people talk about ‘friends’ they often aren’t really claiming to know that person socially, or that they see them on the weekends, or have their home number. They would even be surprised if you made that assumption. To them, when they say ‘friend’ they mean it and expect it to be understood by the listener as ’someone I know’.

…Which is to say, no one is your friend. Very much like an offline version of Facebook or any other social network site that presumes too much in listing your contacts as “friends”. This tell me that the currency in what used to be known as genuine friendship is gone — paradoxically, due to the spread of effortless communication/contact.