Danah Boyd, of the School of Information Management & Systems at the University of California, Berkeley , is (as far as I am aware) the first person to define the term "friendster whore". She is researching Friendster and other social networks tools, trying to understand how people present their digital identity, negotiate social contexts and articulate their relationships.
Her definition, which I have adopted, is taken from her blog Connected Selves, September 1, 2003:
"Friendster whores - people who simply collect as many people as possible" (for further information about Danah's work please see the post for October 11th below, or visit her blog apophenia)
Update: Rich from the #friendster IRC network states that he came up with the term back in February (see his post below, Oct. 21st)
Sunday, November 30
Two million.
Hey, I did it! I know, I know, what a geeky-dorky and ultimately meaningless accomplishment, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless. (Quick, someone call David Letterman and the Guinness Book of World Records!)
Two million friendsters in two months (Sept. 30 - Nov. 30, 2003). That's like meeting 33,300 new people every day for two months. Hmmm, maybe I should consider a career in politics ... or selling Avon hee hee hee...
Anyways, from this point on, I'm just gonna sit back, and let this gremlin grow on its own as people ask to be added (perhaps add a couple links myself from time to time, but not wholesale).
And I'm going to ask all the people in my personal network to make links with each other, so that if my profile is whacked, at least my friendsters can enjoy the fun of an expanded network to wander through and explore...
It's been great fun, and I'll stick around, but I have other things in my life to interest me and keep me occupied, so I'll just check in from time to time to see how big the gremlin has gotten. Other projects beckon...
Saturday, November 29
Just a l'il more :-) ...
Highest ID number in the New People display: Iqbal (4171575) * 0.93 = 3,879,565
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 52%
Ooh... getting close... just 786 friendsters to go...
(*starting to feel like Cruella de Vil looking for stray dalmations...*)
"You welcomed me into your bed with open arms..."
Highest ID number in the New People display: Trisha (4169903) * 0.93 = 3,878,010
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 52%
Much to my surprise, I stumbled across another Friendster tribe on tribe.net (I don't know how I could have missed it up until now)... and came across this very funny open letter from Steve to Friendster:
October 18, 2003 - 08:39 AM
Open Letter to Friendster
You welcomed me into your bed with open arms. Your soft grey lines, your understated fashion, so chic, so ultra PoMo, so trendy minimalism meets sprockets. And so submissive. I'd click your buttons and you'd show me things I'd never dreamed. You'd invite people into our relationship. You were never jealous. The more the merrier. And those you invited were always beautiful. We had luminous ego sex that would melt your face off.
But then one day you started inviting less savory types into our love nest. Midtown finance managers. Grocery store managers. Accountants. Our harem, once a bastion of self gratification and masturbatory egoism, turned into a den of monotonous drivel. And the more fucktards you invited, the fatter and slower you became. You trollop. No longer responsive to my tender entreaties, you had other suitors to please with your largess. I didn't need that many people in our bed, Friendster. No man needs a network of 500,000 lovers.
And then one day I called you up, and you ignored me. No answering machine, just a 404 error. What the hell does 404 mean, Friendster? Is that some secret code you share with your other fuck buddies?
Well Friendster, I've had it. You hussy, you strumpet, you slow-witted jezebel, goodbye.
Friday, November 28
Lags...
Highest ID number in the New People display: kL (4150269) * 0.93 = 3,859,750
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 51%
One of the things that many friendsters complain about, and that annoys me as well, is the lag in linking to a person's friends, friends-of-friends, etc. when that person is added to your personal network.
For example, I'm linked to Wei Rong in Shanghai (not literally, of course :-) and this morning when I checked, I wasn't linked to her network. Now I am. There seems to be a definite lag developing here, and as the network grows in popularity and size, the lag is getting noticeably worse.
ARGH...just found another one...linked to Eric in Olympia, but not to any of his friends :-(
Thursday, November 27
"Yeah, but it's hard not to be"
Highest ID number in the New People display: Matthew (4104211) * 0.93 = 3,816,916
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 51%
There's a great article in today's New York Times covering Danah Boyd and her research on social networks such as Friendster. Since I know that some of you likely don't have (or want) a userid and password to get into NYT for just one article, I've copied much of it below for you to read...
My favourite part: this little gem:
Would Ms. Boyd date his friends? "Oh, God, no," she said.
Even though she's part of the same network?
"Yeah, but it's hard not to be," she said.
November 27, 2003
Decoding the New Cues in Online Society
By MICHAEL ERARD
SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.
So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www.zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors...
...The basic idea behind Friendster and other social networking sites is not new. Neither is the technology, which is based on a business process patent from a 1997 site called SixDegrees.com that failed because too few people were online at the time. (That patent was recently purchased for $700,000 by two of Friendster's competitors.) Jonathan Abrams, a 33-year-old dot-com survivor, conceived of Friendster as a dating site, but people's social curiosity turned it into a place where everyone becomes the center of an unfolding drama (or comedy) of connections.
Ms. Boyd has found the site populated by a variety of subcultures: a large contingent of gay men from New York City, the Bay Area's Burning Man scene, ravers in Baltimore. Porn queens and venture capitalists share the site with neo-Nazis and garden-variety hipsters. Most users are in their 20's and 30's. Many are overseas, particularly in Asia.
Bringing all those worlds together is not without its perils. "What social software like Friendster does is collapse our networks in ways we're not used to," Ms. Boyd said.
Devon Lake, 25, a high school teacher, discovered that this fall when she was bombarded with requests from former students to accept them into her Friendster circle, which she uses to keep in touch with her friends from Burning Man, the annual primal gathering in the Nevada desert. The potential costs of putting one part of her network in contact with the other part were too high, so she rebuffed her students and cleaned up her profile by removing anything that could be interpreted as a reference to drugs. "I'm a young teacher, so drawing that line is already a careful balancing act," Ms. Lake said. "It made me feel on my guard about what I posted to the site."
Ms. Boyd pointed to another consequence of the new architecture: people have expanded their Friendster networks with imperial gusto. Some create fake friends called Pretendsters. These are fake profiles generated at www.tree-axis.com and automatically posted to Friendster.com. According to the Tree-axis site, approximately 8,000 Pretendsters coexist with real people on Friendster.
The Pretendsters also skew the site's user data. Currently 3.9 million accounts are registered at Friendster, though it is impossible to tell how many of those belong to real people. That's why 2,619 of the Pretendsters have been hunted and terminated by Friendster Webmasters.
There have also been Fakesters, evidence of how contemporary Americans crave connectedness. Users composed profiles for their pets (and then connected their pets), their colleges (and then connected to their alma maters) and household odds and ends (and then watched the conversation that developed between "salt" and "pepper"). To Ms. Boyd it was interesting not only because people played with identity, but also because of the range of reasons they did so.
Apparently Friendster management could conceive of only one reason: to subvert the site. So it began terminating the Fakesters. That set off a Fakester revolution, complete with a manifesto: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all fakesters and real people are created equal."
Ms. Boyd's favorite story to emerge from a summer spent interviewing Fakesters was about two young men who invented a woman. Her name was Sarah Tuttle. "We wanted to make a woman to write introductions for us," encouraging other Friendster members to get in touch, said David Gartner, a 32-year-old marketing consultant. "We made her sort of confident, sort of sexy, all these things we wanted in a friend." Mr. Gartner put up a photo of an ex-girlfriend's midriff and made Sarah Tuttle a yoga instructor because, he said, "everybody in San Francisco is a yoga instructor."
Sarah Tuttle (whose profile can be found at vsgoliath.com/photos/tuttle) never became the author of an introduction, but other men thought she was real, so they began sending her messages. "We ended up seeing the view of what it's like being a woman," Mr. Gartner said. "There was all this weird stuff about Scrabble," one of the interests included in her profile.
Mr. Gartner and his friend responded only once to a man who seemed genuine. To their alarm, the man wrote back, prompting them to remove their creation from Friendster. Shortly afterward, Mr. Gartner met a real woman at a party and has been dating her ever since.
"The fact of the matter is that the space is being used in all those different ways," Ms. Boyd said. "But Friendster is trying to cut off any behavior that is not in line with their marketing perspective and the idea that this is a dating site."
Friendster's founder, Mr. Abrams, contacted by phone for this article, said the demands of running the site were such that he had no time to comment. Ms. Boyd said that Mr. Abrams had rejected her advice. "He didn't want to know anything that would help user experiences unless it has to do with dating," she said. "At another point he told me that it was my type of people who were ruining the system, meaning the Burning Man, freak, San Francisco crowd."
Would Ms. Boyd date his friends? "Oh, God, no," she said.
Even though she's part of the same network?
"Yeah, but it's hard not to be," she said.
This is another mistake that Friendster and other sites make, Ms. Boyd contends. The site is built on the premise that friendship is transitive; that is, that if A is a friend of B, and B a friend of C, then A can be a friend of C, too.
But friendship develops in social contexts, Ms. Boyd says; it doesn't just flow through the pipes of a network. "Just because you're friends with somebody doesn't mean their friends are similar in the type of context you are with your friends," she said. Unless the social networking sites adapt to how people need to use them, she said, the sites will not succeed.
A lively speaker sometimes inclined to pink hair, Ms. Boyd is part of a cohort of young scholars who are trying to come up with ways to describe these new social behaviors in the online environments in which they have grown up. She and her peers "are talking about this from an inside, embedded perspective," said Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel Research who was a co-director of Ms. Boyd's master's thesis at M.I.T. "One of the challenges for them is, how do they analyze this thing they have grown up inside of?"
Ms. Boyd grew in up in Lancaster, Pa., and was introduced to far-flung virtual communities in the early 1990's by her younger brother. Soon afterward, their mother wisely signed up for two Compuserve accounts. "It gave me an opportunity to talk to people who were far more like me than anybody I knew in real life," Ms. Boyd said.
She said she comes to her research through experiences as a perpetual outsider. "I didn't grow up in an elite community," she said. "I was the daughter of a single mother. I grew up queer in a rural environment. I grew up as a woman in computer science. I grew up constantly negotiating these spaces where they didn't exactly welcome me with open arms."
After studying computer science as an undergraduate at Brown, she turned to the social side of things at M.I.T., studying at the Media Lab and producing a project that visualized people's e-mail networks.
Taking a year off from school, Ms. Boyd found herself in the Bay Area, hanging out with many of the people who were developing Friendster and other social-network sites. She began a blog to document what she saw; her critiques became useful; people began asking her - and hiring her - to do more.
The chief executive of one social-networking site, tribe.net, Mark Pincus, has sought her advice because she is involved in some of the groups to which his site tries to appeal. "Danah's this researcher, but she also lives the whole thing - the Burning Man scene, the rave scene, the techno music scene," he said.
Her academic supervisors are envious of her advantage. "I look at cyberspace the way a deep-sea diver looks at the sea: through a glass plate," said Ms. Boyd's academic adviser, Peter Lyman, a professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. "She is out there swimming in it."
Yet she is not so immersed that she uses Friendster for dating. "I'm not theoretically opposed to it, and if I weren't studying it, I might think about it," she said. "It's a matter of not needing to mess with potential subjects. When I'm on the site, I don't want to be thinking about who's cute. I want to pay attention to the social behavior."
Wednesday, November 26
Survey: Friendsters online longer; Esther Dyson speaks out.
Highest ID number in the New People display: Nicolas (4096966) * 0.93 = 3,810,178
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 51%
Quote below taken from Surfers Spend Nearly Two Hours on Friendster, an Hour More Than Top Dating Sites, According to Nielsen//NetRatings (Press Release Newswire, via NewsNow.co.uk)
According to the most recent Nielsen//NetRatings NetView figures, Friendster, a member community destination, attracted 927,000 visitors from home and work in October 2003. Those logging on to Friendster spent an average of one hour and fifty-one minutes on the site in October... By comparison, the top personals site, Yahoo! Personals attracted 4.9 million surfers from home and work in October 2003. Each surfer spent an average of 35 minutes during the month on Yahoo! Personals. Following closely was Match garnering 3.9 million Internet users who spent more than 55 minutes on the site in October. The third most popular site was AmericanSingles attracting 3.7 million individuals during the same period. Rounding out the top five destinations was MSN Dating & Personals and Netscape Love & Personals, drawing 1.9 million and 1.5 million home and work visitors, respectively. "The member community format is quickly becoming a popular social network on the web," said Lauren Taub, Internet analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings. "Friendster's growth is impressive, but it is too early to tell if its early success is explained by unique functionality or the fact that it is currently a free service. " (emphasis on last sentence is mine)
Well, I guess we're going to find out soon enough if the attraction to Friendster is due to the service being free...
Also, there's a good article by Esther Dyson on the social software phenomenon that's well worth reading: Buying and Selling the Little Black Book. Here's a brief quote:
One side of me loves this stuff. After all, the Internet was meant to connect us all. But I'm also concerned that we're heading to a world of surveillance, not just on the part of governments or even corporations, but widespread peer-to-peer surveillance. And I wonder whether we devalue our relationships by turning them into data points -- much as my friends and I protested against being "folded, spindled or mutilated" back in the '60s.
Sunday, November 23
1.9 million....
Highest ID number in the New People display: Skid (4026629) * 0.93 = 3,744,765
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 51%
"But you can almost hear the collective breath being held - as everyone waits to see what happens once Friendster starts charging. To me - it's almost like waiting for the SuperBowl or a Presidential election. You know it's coming, you know it's gonna be important - but you really don't know what's gonna happen." (Canter, Marc. Where's the Bucks? AlwaysOn, Nov. 21, 2003)
Saturday, November 22
Friendstapo!
Highest ID number in the New People display: Sara (3991157) * 0.93 = 3,711,776
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 51%
An excellent WIRED article by Daniel Terdiman on recent developments in Friendster (in fact it's so good, I'm going to quote it in full below).
NEW WORD OF THE DAY (from this article): Friendstapo (FRIEND-SHTAH-POH, in a German accent; = Friendster Gestapo) ... I *love* it....
Friendster Quickly Gathering Foes
By Daniel Terdiman 02:00 AM Nov. 21, 2003 PT
Friendster looks to be all the rage. Walk into any supermarket and you're likely to overhear milk stockers talking about it. It recently scored some big new venture capitalist funding. And its membership rolls are blooming.
But behind the fairy tale of an Internet success story is a disturbing trend.
Though it remains at the top of the online social networking heap, there are increasing rumblings that some of Friendster's earliest core users are unhappy with it. And now that they've found alternatives to the service, many are packing up and moving on.
The key issues behind the Friendster abandonment trend, according to users, are the service's inability to do anything about its habitual server lag problems, and its growing reputation for heavy-handed moral policies and unilateral decisions it makes on behalf of its members.
Friendster did not make anyone available for comment for this story.
"It was much fun once I was on (Friendster), friend-requesting everyone and amassing a surprising, to me, amount of testimonials," recalls Allison Lange of her early experiences with Friendster. "I loved logging in each day and seeing all my friends' shiny happy faces beaming up at me."
But Lange's own happy times with Friendster quickly faded.
"First of all, the service was always slow," she said. "Then, the 'Friendstapo' showed up and started killing fakesters" -- fake member personas that became popular on the service -- "auditing what photos people could use and censoring language. It all really disagreed with me on an ideological level, and because it made Friendster less fun."
Lange is not alone. Others talk of problems such as extreme difficulties getting the service to adhere to requests for membership cancellation.
"I tried to delete my profile on Friendster, but couldn't find any way to do that with their interface," says former member Kevin Gilmore. "I e-mailed their support to ask how I deleted my profile. I was told that they didn't do that (and that) if I didn't want to use the service ... I should just not log on. That was not good enough for me. So, I pushed them further. I told them I wanted my profile gone. They were rude. They were indignant. I threatened a lawsuit. My profile disappeared. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth."
Clearly, one of the problems Friendster is having is with its service and support teams. Its website lists a phone number to call with questions, but the voice message on that line refers all callers to departmental e-mail addresses.
There are some who feel that the service still suits their needs, especially when it comes to dating. That, of course, may be Friendster's strongest suit and what has so far kept it significantly ahead of competitors like Tribe.net.
"I haven't taken down my Friendster profile, nor am I likely to, for one simple reason," says a member who calls herself Mermaid. "Friendster actually does one thing better than Tribester, and yes, I call it that on purpose, and that thing is dating. Friendster is all about the hookup."
Heathen Michael Persephone, another Friendster devotee, agrees, and thinks Friendster does the best job of enabling her sex life.
"I like Friendster because it is more people-oriented," she says. "Tribe is more geared towards selling used blenders and looking for a job. I don't need to be reminded how many jobless people there are, or what awful things people will do for a buck.... What I want is the fantasy that we are all rock stars, that everyone's ass looks great in leather, that everyone is sexy."
Yet, despite the way Friendster succeeded so rapidly at helping people get a solid handle on what their networks of friends were like, it is likely going to have a hard time keeping those people happy unless it does a better job of listening to them and addressing their concerns.
One concern is that Friendster needs to lighten up and give its users what they want.
"Friendster ... lacked a sense of humor," says Lisa Pimental. "Many of us had created profiles for our pets, and we were having fun hooking up our dogs and cats. And Friendster came along and deleted those profiles."
Perhaps Friendster's biggest problem is that its list of competitors is growing, and that some of them, particularly Tribe, get much better performance reviews.
"Tribe.net shows all the polish of a team taking a good long look at Friendster, noting both its limitations and also what people on Friendster were trying to do," says Tribe fan Dennis Hescox. "Friendster seemed to have an opinion about how someone should use their system and blocking any other uses the community tried to use it for."
All of this is, of course, music to Mark Pincus' ears. Pincus, Tribe's CEO, is also an investor in Friendster, but he seems to realize that taking the moral high road on an online social networking tool is not the way to go.
"We don't want to make our network one that works well for one segment and turns off whole other segments," Pincus says. "I can't tell you we're never going to piss off some segment of our users. (But) we're trying to create enough sandboxes and segment enough so that people can express themselves and not be offensive to others."
The bottom line for Friendster may be that it misread the needs of those who have left for other services, like Tribe or Emode.
"The main issue with Friendster is that it treats every member as an individual, rather than tackling the much more complex issue of groups," says Katrina Glerum, who developed a social networking program for University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. "I think Tribe is better, because it starts with the assumption that people are parts of communities, rather than that people are all lone gunmen."
I did a User Search on the author, Daniel Terdiman, found him, and sent him this message:
Great article! Thank you.
Message:
I must confess that I have to agree with everything you said in the article. I only stay on Friendster because I treat it like a game... I would *NEVER* think of hooking up with someone thru friendster (that's what gay.com is for... LOL).
As a bona-fide Friendster Whore, I try to collect as many people as possible, kinda like baseball cards. I treat the size of my personal network like a pinball score: how high can I go before I hit a wall (i.e. Jonathan Abrams takes me out, or the network fails, etc.)?? It's kind of like Sandra Bullock driving that bus that can't slow down or it'll blow up... Friendster is growing like mad, still, despite all the people packing up and moving on, and it's exciting to stick around and see what happens when things are changing that quickly and unexpectedly.
--Ryan the Friendster Slut
http://friendsterslut.blogspot.com
P.S. if it's OK with you, please add me to your
network: Ryan Schultz, ryanwinnipeg@yahoo.ca
harsh light of reality: a journal entry
Highest ID number in the New People display: John Kenneth (3986456) * 0.93 = 3,707,404
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
I kicked myself BIG time last night for spending an hour and a half sending out the message in my previous post to quite a few people in my Gallery, friendsters of friendsters. In my journal I wrote:
" I spent one and a half hours on Friendster after work, I'm up to over 1.8 million people in my network. I'm wasting my time on this stupid thing, collecting people like trading cards, racking up my network counts like pinball scores. This is actually kind of disturbing: a horror-house hall-of-mirrors version of my own striving too hard to be everybody's friend, to make myself a part of the biggest network possible, so I don't have to feel unloved and alone. How pathetic..."
Oooh (*squints*) harsh light of reality. Eyes hurt. Must... Run... Away....
Friday, November 21
"Do you suffer?"
Highest ID number in the New People display: Adam (3970763) * 0.93 = 3,692,810
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
I've had a long and tiring day at work. Time for a little fun...
"Do you suffer?"
Do you suffer the shame of F.D.D.* ?
Did you know that clinical studies ** have proven that friendster whores*** can cure even the most stubborn and resistant cases of F.D.D.?
DIRECTIONS:
1. Go to User Search.
2. Under "Search all Friendster Users", enter the email address: ryanwinnipeg@yahoo.ca
3. When the picture of Ryan the Friendster Whore appears (trust me, you can't miss it), click on the link "[Add Ryan as Your Friend]"
That’s it! Three easy steps and you, too, can hold your head high when your friends boast about the sizes of their personal networks!
Remember our slogan: “Broaden your horizons—Link to a Friendster Whore” ™
----------
* F.D.D. = Friendster Deficit Disorder
**well, uh, O.K., there were no clinical studies. But I typed this message wearing glasses and a long white lab coat, if it makes you feel any better.
*** "Friendster whore," a person who collects as many friends as possible. (Boyd, Danah. Connected Selves blog, Sept. 1, 2003)
:-)
Thursday, November 20
Friendster Spam!
Highest ID number in the New People display: Collette (3939375) * 0.93 = 3,663,619
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: still at 50%
Sneaking a quick peek on my late late lunch-break (working shifted back today)...
Well, this is a first for me: I get a message from Natalie:
Subject:
I know you like me. ;)
Message:
Hey Ryan. I know you've been looking at my booty in my pics. I think its cool and want you to see more. :-) I have a nude personal ad and more pictures at www.NudePeeps.Allhere.com
Dont freak, its free!
Uhhh, Natalie... if you think I've been looking at your booty, then you haven't been looking at my profile, sweetheart :-) SPAM alert! Happens all the time in the gay.com chatrooms, now it's happening here.
Danah, Dame Edna, and Buddha...
Highest ID number in the New People display: Aileen (3930571) * 0.93 = 3,655,431
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
A couple of days ago, Dame Edna finally accepted an invitation to join my rapidly-snowballing personal network (although perhaps, at 1.8 million, I should start calling it an impersonal network...if I spent one minute with every person in my network, it would take three and a half years...call my receptionist to book your appointment LOL!).
Yesterday, I accepted a friendster request from Buddha and today, Danah Boyd of Connected Selves (from whom I gratefully appropriated the term "friendster whore") added me to her network.
At any moment my co-workers, friends and family are going to break down my door and stage an intervention :-) ...but I'm smarter than them because I know I can stop anytime I want!. MWA HA HA
Oh, and Friendsters Anonymous is back up (yay!) and the testimonials are just as hilarious as ever.
Wednesday, November 19
Where's the Friendsters Anonymous profile?
Highest ID number in the New People display: Cory (3910604) * 0.93 = 3,636,862
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
God, I don't believe this...they pulled the Friendsters Anonymous profile again.
Thank God most of us who were members started linked to each other, but still...what gives?!?
1.8 million! (*Ryan does the happy Friendster Slut dance*)
Highest ID number in the New People display: Liz (3899736) * 0.93 = 3,626,755
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
Tuesday, November 18
Fashion whores, pop-culture whores, so many kinds of whores!
Highest ID number in the New People display: Dallas (3879147) * 0.93 = 3,607,607
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
I'm *so* close to 1.8 million I can taste it... watch, it'll drop like a stone again just shy of 1.8....
The term "friendster whore" led me to do an interests search of how other Friendsters use the word in their profiles to indicate an addiction or compulsion of some sort. It's a surprisingly small number (only 402 when I checked). Here's a few uses (some of them I think are hilarious):
- eBay whore
- museum whore
- DVD whore
- message board whore (also chat whore)
- label whore (also fashion whore)
- pop-culture whore
- scene whore
- Xanga whore
- travel whore
- thrift shop whore
- vinyl whore (i.e. vinyl records , LPs)
- cultural studies whore
- coffee whore
- Barnes & Noble whore
- media whore
- corporate whore
- “a total shoe whore”
Well, anyway, you get the idea…
Shameless Celebrity Linking
Highest ID number in the New People display: Jenny (3870658) * 0.93 = 3,599,712
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
Yes, the Friendster Slut is guilty of SCFLS (= Shameless Celebrity Friendster Linking Syndrome), and yes, it's terminal :-)
Let's see, who do I have in my network at the moment: Angelyne, Margaret Cho, Dame Edna Everage, Lady Miss Kier, Bruce LaBruce, Scotty Schwartz, and Judy Tenuta. I did have Michael Moore in my network, but I seem to have lost him (hmmm....government conspiracy?). (if you feel aggrieved because you feel you qualify for celebrity status, send me a line and I'll add you too: ryanwinnipeg@yahoo.ca :-) ...
Monday, November 17
Bop the Beach Ball....
Highest ID number in the New People display: Joe (3834812) * 0.93 = 3,566,375
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50% (remaining remarkably steady...)
Fellow friendster whore Carl and I agreed that we would ask our respective networks (mine is 1.7 million, his is 1.3 million) to link to the other person's profile as well. I've already noticed an increase just one day after his bulletin board message was posted.
Some rather interesting messages have been posted as bulletin board messages on various people's personal networks, much in the same way those inflatable beach balls get bopped back and forth in the crowd at outdoor concerts. First it was the birthday list, now it's the pornstar name game:
To get your porn star name, you need to combine
your very first pet's name (first name) and the
street you grew up on (last name).
Copy this message, add your real and porn star
name, and post it on the bulletin board for some
good, clean, adulterated fun! (Be honest!)
Some of the howlers that people have come up with: Tawtaw Mahogany; Keke Hihlltop; Smut Hsperides (yeah, right--you had a pet named Smut. WHAT-ever); Thumper Sunny Vista; Margarita Manzanita; Fuzzy Queen; Boobooshi du Côteau; Sioux Fox (actually, that's quite a good one :-) ...
So, you may ask, what would *MY* porn name be? Well, hate to disappoint you, but I never had a pet in my life (childhood allergies to feathers and pet hair took care of that one), BUT... my Grandpa had a cat named Blackie, soooo....
Blackie McMeans (ugh...) and so I bop the beach ball to antoher personal network....
Saturday, November 15
One-and-three-quarters million... and I just want to be linked :-)
Highest ID number in the New People display: Chee Ying (3778379) * 0.93 = 3,513,893
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
And did you know, that I am the blogosphere, according to the quiz What Kind of Social Software Are You?...
Friday, November 14
Friendster Haiku... Social Networking Websites and Software: The Canonical List.
Highest ID number in the New People display: Ellen (3756328) * 0.93 = 3,493,385
Percentage of total friendsterpace covered by personal network: 50%
Lunch break again, checking back in. Still bouncing up and down, but overall an upward trend (God, now I sound like a stockbroker...by the way, I did finally sign into LinkedIn just to check it out. Not bad. At least it's not a dating site LOL...). If you're on LinkedIn, look for me: Ryan Schultz, ryanwinnipeg@yahoo.ca, just like for all the other sites :-)
OK, now, where was I? Oh yes, Friendster Haiku....
Since today I celebrate the breaking of one million
people in my personal friendster network, I give you
three haikus from which you may choose the one best
describing your mental vision of my elation:
1.
one million friendsters?
some of us have real goals, now,
if you'll excuse me...
2.
huh, that's pretty neat
out of a million people
only met, like, five?
3.
hells yeah you mofo's,
done broke a million friendsters:
ownage, babe, OWNAGE!
This poetry is courtesy of my new friendster Sean, who apparently has a whole collection...I'll have to email him to see the rest. OWNAGE, Baby! :-) that's my new word for the day.
Meanwhile, the Slashdot crowd is debating the merits of yet another social software network: Huminity. Lots of good back-and-forth that Slashdot is famous for... One of the gems from that little discussion is this: The Canonical List of Social Networking Websites and Software (all *FORTY* of them...). Hmmm... maybe I should stop collecting friendsters and start collecting social software sites :-)
Thursday, November 13
A milestone.... friends fall out over a patent... "We call it the new online crack"
Highest ID number in the New People display: Alex (3724363) * 0.93 = 3,463,658
Percentage of total friendsterspace covered by personal network: 50%
I sneak a peek at Friendster at my lunch break (I just can't help myself *sob*)...
Woo-hoo! 1.7 million friendsters! Given the way my personal network size keeps bouncing up and down, it probably won't last long, though...
A quick check of the online news services (Google News and NewsNow) shows a recent blizzard of Friendster articles...a *LOT* more interest is being shown by the media as Friendsterzilla continues on its rampage :-) ... and a very interesting ZDnet news item by a CNET news reporter, about tribe.net and LinkedIn ganging together to shut Jonathan Abrams and company out of a key software patent (quote below):
"The Six Degrees patent, a Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system, was sold at auction by YouthStream Media Networks on 23 September, along with related intellectual property rights and software.
The patent was originally granted to Six Degrees of Separation, a social networking site that came -- and went -- a few years before the current crop of sites. YouthStream Media Networks acquired the patent when Six Degrees went out of business.
When buying the patent, Hoffman deliberately excluded Abrams from the deal." (emphasis is mine)
As Bette Davis said: "Fasten your seatbelt; it's going to be a bumpy night." Such drama potential, former friends falling out as the cash rains down...I think we should start casting for the made-for-TV movie now....who plays Jonathan Abrams, who plays Marc Pincus, etc.
I, of course, will play myself ;-)
And then there's a really good quote from an article on Friendster addiction on the Contra Costa Times:
"We call it the new online crack," said Carrie White, a 28-year-old Atlanta electronica/house music promoter, who has collected 167 first-link friends that stretch to an absurd 950,000 people once you move out four degrees of separation. "Some friends are so addicted that when they come over, they want to use my computer immediately to check their Friendster account."
And what is so absurd about 950,000 friendsters? :-) I call that a good start... :-D
Tuesday, November 11
Friendster as Reality TV
Highest ID number in the New People display: Jon (3660990) * 0.93 = 3,404,721
Percentage of total friendspace covered by personal network: 49%
I sent a message to Jenna:
Your testimonial on the Friendsters Anonymous profile is absolutely hilarious! Thanks for giving me such a good laugh.
If it's OK with you, please add me to your network.
Name: Ryan Schultz
Email: ryanwinnipeg@yahoo.ca
thanks!
Ryan the Friendster Slut
http://friendsterslut.blogspot.com
P.S. I think you and I should come up for some rules for a Friendster drinking game...
For those of you who couldn't access the link to Friendsters Anonymous, here's Jenna's post:
"The other night my friends and I hooked up the laptop to a widescreen TV and watched friendster together like it was reality television. It soon became a drinking game and we were all loaded by the end of the evening and had written overemotional and inappropriate testimonials to everyone we knew. I'm never going on friendster drunk again."
Monday, November 10
Four degrees, MY ASS!
Highest ID number in the New People display: Lee (3568539) * 0.93 = 3,318,741
Percentage of total friendspace covered by personal network: 49%
" I am going to commit friendster suicide...dont try and stop me, this method of communicating is to slow...i have to go. TR"
This is the second friendster suicide I've heard of...the first one changed his mind after massive feedback from his fellow friendsters.
Oh, and what the hell is going on with the linking system in Friendster?!? I link to Wendy in Shanghai, that's one hop. But at least three of Wendy's friends I don't have links to...and they're only two hops away. Four degrees of separation my ass...Jonathan Abrams and company had better fix some of the many technical problems with Friendster before they start charging for it. As it is, droves of friendsters seem to be migrating to myspace.com, keeping a foot in both camps.
Sunday, November 9
Wallop!
Highest ID number in the New People display: Tommy (3603857) * 0.93 = 3,351,587
Percentage of total friendster-space covered by personal network: 49%
From WIRED News: "Social-networking sites proliferate, but none so far dominates. Will Microsoft's mishmash of blogging, networking and messenging technologies win over the uninitiated masses -- or is it vaporware?" Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster? by Kari L. Dean. Apparently Microsoft is working on a Friendster-killer, an instant-messaging/social-network software hybrid called Wallop. I guess they realy are running out of names, eh? :-)
Saturday, November 8
"someone who's not holding a digital camera up to a bathroom mirror"
Highest ID number in the New People display: Valérie (3576282) * 0.93 = 3,325,942
Percentage of total friendspace covered by personal network: 49%
I have been watching my network size bounce up and down: 1.64 million... 1.59 million... 1.53 million... suddenly it's back up to 1.64 million...
I just had to post this, from Brooke's profile in my personal network. It is so true it makes my face hurt from smiling and laughing...
"Who I want to meet: someone who is not a DJ. someone who isn't holding a beer and/or cigarette in their picture. someone without a tattoo. someone who's not holding a digital camera up to a bathroom mirror. someone who likes to go people watching. someone with my same exact CD collection. someone non- existent. someone impossible. someone. anyone. you."
Hmmm... I think there's another Friendster challenge (or maybe a Friendster drinking game) in there, somewhere :-)
Oh, and this blogger has made some profound observations about why Friendster is rad/sucks ...some excellent points are raised. Bravo.
Wednesday, November 5
Woo-hoo! 1.6 million friendsters!
Highest ID number in the New People display: Billy (3404841) * 0.93 = 3,166,502
Percentage of total friendspace covered by personal network: 51%
I've decided to shut down my annex, and move the connected friendsters to my main profile. So far so good...
The Heinz Ketchup of Networks....
Highest ID number in the New People display: Ita (3490733) * 0.93 = 3,246,382
Percentage of total friendspace covered by personal network: 49%
Posted today in the Friendster Sucks tribe on tribe.net:
"How I used Friendster tonight"
"Entered username and password.
Went to kitchen.
Microwaved something for dinner (leftover beef stew... yum.)
Emptied the dishwasher.
Came back to the computer to find my homepage with no network.
Clicked to get my messages.
Surfed Tribe.
Clicked on the picture of the person who sent the new message.
Surfed Tribe some more.
Discovered that my connection to him was unavailable.
Clicked back.
Surfed tribe even more. Posted a message.
Clicked reply.
Sent the guy a short note.
Surfed Tribe while I waited for it to send.
Clicked home.
Surfed tribe and wrote this message while I waited for my homepage to load.
It finally has my network. Good for it. "
Tuesday, November 4
"24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week freak show"
Highest ID number in the New People display: Axue (3449866) * 0.93 = 3,208,375
Percentage of total friendspace covered by personal network: 49%
The Buttafly blog has a very funny article by Jennifer Bishop Fulwiler on Friendster: "About every five minutes you’re on this site you’ll find yourself thinking, “Who the hell is friends with these freaks?” And that, in a nutshell, is the beauty of Friendster. Because the answer is always, “MY friends.” "
© Copyright 2003 Ryan Schultz.
