on Friendster

Friendster is an interesting concept, the idea of an online community gathering a bunch of people together who know each other in real life. As far as I can tell in the few months that I’ve been on, the only purposes are to accumulate gobs and gobs of friends (kinda like inviting MTV Cribs into your profile and showing off your 100’s of friends) and meeting people (aka ‘hooking up’).

Maybe job networking — although I guess it could be used for that anyway. Or maybe true peer-to-peer file sharing (dirty words, I know).

A fair number of people on my Friends list are local (or previously local) theatre people. And so, when they have events happening, they can post it on the message board. So, that’s one more use.

zefrank expounded about the idea of a Friendster friend recently:

Of course it all begs the question, What the fuck is a friend anways?

I mean if you lined up all my friends and enemies in this room, you couldn’t tell a difference. It’s mediated through activity.

I’m reminded of the stories of Word War II where German and British soliders took time out to celebrate Christmas together and then the next day they bombarded each other with munitions and machine gun fire.

In my version of Friendster, you’d have to pick me up from the airport or at least lend me money before I’d let you in …

In thinking about implementing blogs and other kinds of communities for my clients, the idea of creating this kind of interaction is more and more challenging. In this age where we are bombarded with so much information. It makes me think about certain key questions.

What makes a website valuable? A blog? A bulletin board? Chat functionality? What makes you my friend? What makes you my peer? I wonder if anyone tried to add me as thier Friendster friend today?