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Pony: Friendster:You Never Know Who You'll Meet
8.14.2003
So I have been playing with Friendster and trying to figure out what makes it fun.
For those of you who are not obsessive interwebbers, here is the scoop:
You get invited or you join up to the network.
You write a profile for yourself and upload a picture.
You invite your friends to join and go through the same process, while writing "testimonials" about each other that the public can read.
It is kind of like your second chance at a high school yearbook.
The intrigue follows the same lines as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or the '70's Agree Shampoo commercials (and they tell 2 friends, and so on, and so on....).
You get to see how many people you have in common with your friends.
There is even a guy who has built a friendster spider that lets you build diagrams based on your network of friends. (link c/o boingboing).
There is a somewhat crude relevance tool at work that makes links out of each of your interests. The link connects you to a gallery page of people who listed the same.
Missing, perhaps, is a function that compiles all your interests and faves and presents you with the top ten people with the most similar profiles. holy narcisismo.
For single people, it gives you one more avenue for meeting up with like-minded hotties.
At the corner of my page is this announcement:
"Do you have a great single friend that you want to help? Tell everyone about your friend to get Friendster working for them!
Being in the "in a relationship" category, however, I suspect that I will get bored of this phenomenon in a few days.
I am surprised that people I know like Joey, who blogs, has 8 IRC channels open at one time, and works in an office these days, feels the impulse to network even more on Friendster. Where's the value-add[sic]?
My grandmother used to say (ususally before one of us was grumpily going to a bar mitzvah or wedding): "You never know who you are going to meet."
I am starting to realize, day 4 on the Friendster Network, that I know exactly who I am going to meet. And that's O.K. I have enjoyed all the little shout-outs to my homies and former co-workers.
On a more paranoid note: Despite the privacy statement, I can't help but feel a little paranoid having linked my name to so many others. In the age of Patriot Act 2, do you think I am beign unreasonable?
