What does adding someone as just a contact mean

in Comet? Until recently I didn't realize that you could "connect" to someone in Comet, but not be their friend or family. I think this concept makes sense, but what does it actually do for me, the user? Making someone a friend or family means that I can make my posts visible only to them, which makes sense. But I can't make a post "contact" only. So if I make someone a "contact" all it really means is that they show up on my "Connect" page. I guess they would also show up in my "neighbhorhood" and I would see their recent posts on my My Comet page. The concept, and the nomenclature, are confusing to me, though. Friends and family seem like types of contacts to me, but really, contacts, friends and family are all types of people you can be connected to on Comet.

It seems like when you connect to someone on Comet, you should be asked to classify the connection as one of three possible things:

i) family
ii) friend
iii) contact (business associate or someone you've just met on Comet)

Right now the ui uses checkboxes, which is just wrong. Something I've always to try and just did, is to add someone as both a friend and a family member. You can do that, which makes no sense to me. The way it should work, IMHO, is to have a drop-down menu with the three options above. That seems much clearer. Dividing the world into family, friends and other people whom you have some connection to but are "close" with seems much closer to the way human beings actually classify people in their minds.

I'm going to rewrite this and submit it to "Feedback" too but I thought I would throw it out to the Comet community at large for discussion too, since Feedback tends to feel like a black box.