Right now there is no option to straight up drop the friend function (in this case it appears you want to drop the friends feed). I think there is a mod for this if I recall right.

I'm letting the stacked team finish up ES 1.2 before giving a awesome proposal to better manage the "News Feed". Basically the idea I have is to allow the admin to manage each feed from a list where they can publish, unpublish, create new feeds, who displays in them, what content appears inside of them (from apps or plugins), and default hashtags. ES partially has paved the way for this with the release of ES 1.1 with the introduction of the "add filter" feature for individuals. I plan on making screen shots and showing exactly how it could work. It would make managing "News Feeds" a breeze while creating a lot of flexibility.

Yes, i read somewhere on forum that "friends" function is pretty much hardwired into the core. I think we can alway hide the related "friends" stuff from the template itself (ex: add friend button and so on)

We will have the feed but just the "followers" feed.

Scenario:

1. I want to see stuff from all the "network" (hence "public stuff posted by everybody") and be able to sort stuff from the people i followed. ("public stuff posted by people i followed")
2. I don't need friends function, i don't need a 2-way user connection where somebody will add a friend and that friend will approve the friend request. A simple follow will be enough.
3. I use EasySocial like a profiling system and a "user activities log" ... so don;t need the entire overkill of a social network scenario (don't need privacy control for post or stream items, don;t need the ability to post directly on stream, we just keep the stream for user activities ..... and so on)

So, in my case the things are really simple and work great with a simple "follow" scenario (twitter style)

Great, Thanks Mark !
If you guys will build the system to allow us to choose what "social graph" model we want (friend or follower) will be awesome.
There are various usage scenarios for EasySocial and this will be a great benefit !

Thanks for your reply on this !

Thanks for the heads up on this. Yes, that is what we are heading to