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[popjournal] |
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| 07.28.03 | man's best friendster? Tiffany Shin's profile popped up on my screen, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We hadn't spoken in more than five years, since our high school graduation, and lately I found myself wondering what ever became of her. We were close friends throughout the seventh and eighth grades, but in high school we drifted to opposite poles — I to the newspaper misfits, she to the hipster Koreans. Just like that, a friendship I once valued as much as any other had dissolved into a handful of yearbook signatures. Keep in touch, we wrote at the time. And I wanted to fulfill my promise. But when a Google search turns up no contact information, what's a boy to do? Today what a boy does is join Friendster, the six-degrees-of-copulation online match game that lately has the Internet abuzz. Rarely in the web's admittedly brief history has such a straightforward service gained so many die-hard users so quickly. Still in beta testing, Friendster began accepting members only in March. Four months later, it recorded its millionth user. A rabid following has sprung up in its wake, analyzing every facet of the site with a level of scrutiny normally associated with the Zapruder film. Even before Slate weighed in this month, I couldn't help but feel that the topic was exhausted. What more was there to say? People join for free, upload personal information and photos, and persuade their friends to do the same. By harnessing the raw power of their extensive personal network, Friendster users can then get laid. (Or at least find what the site calls "activity partners," as if the 18- to 34-year-olds who form the site's core audience go online to chat up potential shuffleboard opponents.) But if the premise is simple, so too is it addictive. My daily visits to Friendster are often fueled by a single question: Who are my friends friends with? As the service grows in popularity, I've enjoyed watching acquaintances' networks swell to improbable sizes. Even people who I assumed were immune to passing Internet fads — people, in other words, who should know better — suddenly have two dozen online pals, with celebrity impostors and fictional characters among them. What's their excuse? Hard to say. My friend Nathan, for one, is at a loss. After an old acquaintance Friendstered him out of the blue, he wrote to me. "I have no idea what this means," he said, "except that I can go and look at what kind of music he likes, and possibly solicit cybersex. If there’s something I’m missing, please let me know." I never wrote Nathan back, because he pretty much had the gist. In fact, an old acquaintance whom I had Friendstered out of the blue, a charming young man named Kelvin, e-mailed to say that the service was getting him down. "I signed up for that Friendster thing a long time ago, but I've never really paid much attention to it," he said. "It's too cumbersome, if you ask me." That's not the word I would choose, although the site's search function can make it needlessly difficult to find people. My main complaint is that at a certain point, one simply runs out of people to Friendster, at which point the site loses much of its value. Take my rekindled relationship with Kelvin, for example. Now that we're e-mailing again, there's little Friendster can do for me — unless I want to see what kind of music he likes, of course, or solicit cybersex. Which brings us to the question of how Friendster might survive its fad status, succeeding where pet rocks and snap bracelets have failed. The site's first priority, as its founder has acknowledged, is to address the technical glitches that continue to plague it. The site's overwhelming popularity means its server is down much of the time, as if it were a Geocities-hosted Avril Lavigne fan page forever exceeding its bandwidth transfer. And speaking of C-list celebrities, Friendster has to find a place for all the fake users who clutter its pages. For example, I've run across half a dozen fake Jonathan Abramses, created by people with apparent hatred for Friendster's nebbishy founder. All these Abramses and Ralph Wiggums and Sex and the City girls may look harmless enough, but like the prolonged server downtime, they make the site look surpassingly amateurish. At the same time, certain user-created abstract concepts — like "Los Angeles," or "black," or "Brown University" — have emerged as important connectors in the rapidly growing network. If I claim "Jewish" as a friend, for example, I have access to all the like-minded Jews on Friendster. Unlike the fictional characters, the abstract concepts can make Friendster more useful, because they expand your pool of potential friends in a way that an ironic Friendstership with Balki does not. That's why Friendster should make affiliations like this part of your profile — I would claim "Northwestern University" and "gay" in mine; Nathan could claim "Northwestern University" and "back hair" in his. This goes against a pure six-degrees philosophy, but if it makes the site more useful, who cares? This much is certain: Whatever improvements Friendster makes are not likely to come free of charge. Soon the site plans to charge fees for some services, including sending messages to potential friends, at which point I predict Friendster will have become its near-namesake, Napster. That old chestnut is itself preparing to re-launch, tantalizing users with its promise of music you don't want at prices you can't afford. "Free" might not have made for a great business plan, but pet rocks and snap bracelets once had business plans of their own, and a fat lot of good that did them. It's true that a snap bracelet never connected me to 140,000 people — at least, not directly. But assuming Friendster crashes and burns — I imagine the Recording Industry Association of America will soon begin suing Friendsters for listing their music preferences — I will surf it till its dying day. After all, it was while surfing that I found the aforementioned Tiffany Shin. After I typed in her first and last names and clicked, a "Tiffany" icon appeared on my screen. I told Friendster she was my friend, placing the ball squarely in her court. Would we become friends once again? The answer, as it turns out, was yes. "Tiffany has approved your request and is now in your friends list," the site told me the next day in one of its bland e-mails. Despite the robotic prose, I was elated. Not only had I reconnected with an old friend, but I had also connected with all of her friends, and their friends, and suddenly my personal network was larger than ever. There was only one problem. A few days later, when I went to read her profile in depth, I discovered that she wasn't Tiffany Shin at all. At least, she wasn't the Tiffany who sat next to me in Mrs. Pritchard's algebra class. In her place was a mopey 21-year-old who, according to a sparsely furnished weblog, was barely attending community college in Costa Mesa. The ethical thing would have been to immediately delete her, but I needed some time to mourn. A week later, I finally mustered the courage and unfriended her. Then I checked my personal network. It was 10,000 people smaller. She might have been a grand disappointment, but I'll say this for Bizarro Tiffany Shin — she gets around. Still, the question nags: Why did she confirm our friendship in the first place? Was there a devastatingly handsome, Bizarro Casey Newton in her past? Or was she simply eager to expand her personal network, like an eager weblogger who'll do anything to boost her hit count? I don't know. No one does. The world is an unforgiving place, and apparently we'll take friends wherever we can find them. Friendster is smart to recognize that; the question is whether they will do anything meaningful with it. For the sake of the real Tiffany Shin, here's hoping. /archived |
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