A columnist for the NYTimes reviewed BuddyZoo.

Be My Buddy

For some people a “buddy list” is simply an online Rolodex for users of AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM. But a new site called BuddyZoo (buddyzoo.com) reveals it to be a document rich in social implications. Studied in the aggregate, buddy lists can even address one of life’s most piquant questions: How popular am I?

In Instant Messenger, a window shows whether people on your preselected buddy list are online and thus able to receive an instant message. If you register and upload your list to BuddyZoo, the site can tell you things like which buddies you share with others and the degrees of separation between you and another Instant Messenger user. A BuddyRank feature calculates your popularity on the basis of how many people include you among their buddies, with extra credit given if you are listed by someone who is popular. BuddyZoo has no affiliation with America Online, but Instant Messenger users already have entered more than four million screen names from their buddy lists into its database in less than a month. Screen names are being added at the rate of more than 100,000 per day, according to the site’s creator, Adam D’Angelo, a computer science student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. (For privacy reasons, the site says, it never reveals your buddy list to others or shares your screen name with those who don’t already list it.)

But BuddyZoo, despite its fast growth, remains a small subset of the Instant Messenger universe of 195 million registered users. Why hasn’t America Online made features like BuddyZoo’s available? “We still view the buddy list as something completely private,” said Derick Mains, an AOL spokesman. “But BuddyZoo is an interesting concept that takes hold of the community and relationship elements that are so key to AIM.” Not to mention the ego element.