Twitter Eliminates "Friends"

Twitter announced today that they changed the behavior of Friends and Followers, essentially they're no longer calling your friends, "friends." They're calling them Followers and then allowing you to toggle notifications on a person-by-person basis.

At first I didn't get it and was actually confused by a few friend requests I received in the morning. When I went to their page I couldn't figure out how to "friend" them. My time was crunched so I couldn't explore further but I've since come across that post explaining it in their blog in Google Reader and now I understand the change.

For new users this certainly should be easier to understand. However, for people that have been using Twitter for awhile, it could potentially be very confusing. At least now there is a nice notice on most pages linking to the blog post. That probably should have been done at the same time the feature changed.