The following message is being posted to various Friendster message boards, revealing user frustration towards Friendster. While i’m fairly certain that the accusations in this message are completely inaccurate, the hostility is stunning.
Subject: Disseminate The Truth About Friendster
Message: John Abrams is running friendster into the ground,. He refuses to acknowledge that his servers are broken into a minimum of three times a day, and his sys admins refuse to return email. the truth about friendster is that it its a ploy to get 2 million working emails so they can sell them to marketing companies who send you spam.. Recently, he struck a deal with another company to sell the list at 15 cents an address. This one deal was worth over 300k…. none of this money is spent on the friendster network, as many of you can tell by the difficulty involved in logging on and navigating the site. here is a snip from an email snatched in transit being sent from john abrams himself to an unnamed employee of an e-mail marketing company..
–snip–
Hello,
My name is John Abrams, founder and lead geek of Friendster.com. Since we opened our site to the public earlier this year, he have amassed nearly 2 million working email addresses. We feel that the address list we have would be very valuble to your business and are willing to negotiate a fair price for this information. We cannot garuntee you exclusive rights to the list, but we can garuntee an email validitiy rate of > 96%.
–end snip–
this bastard is selling your email address, to more than one spam fuck. The frienster network claims to be able to hold up to 2 million simultaneous visitors, but in reality the number is less then half of that. All of his servers are runnining PIRATED aka ILLEGAL software and he only has 15 ipaddress… The whole network is connected to the internet by small wires compareble to your dial-up 56k modem realitive to the task. Friendster is tanking fast, lets all throw rocks at the drowning boy.. Burn in Silicon Valley, John Abrams, you lying rat bastard. Die. You should never have questioned my kung-foo by asking me to hack into your own account you fucker. You think I haven’t been watching you.. 5 years in prison gives you a long time to think about shit, now its your turn.
-km
Please copy this message in it’s entirety and paste it on your own bulletin board and help spread the word.
Danah – thanks for posting the Friendster scandal. It’s very simple…people want to own their personal information.
http://www.typaldos.com
http://www.typaldos.blogspot.com
http://www.cynthia-typaldos.blogspot.com
http://www.softwareproductmarketing.com
I’ve always figured that Friendster was designed to be an e-mail address harvest, which is part of why I quit early on. I felt bad inviting friends to what I expected to be an eventual spam fest. Anyone remember Crushlink? The privacy policy is a little reassuring, but couldn’t they change that policy at any time, and have a huge number of e-mail addresses?
Klint – please realize that i highly doubt that Friendster has any intention of being an email address harvest. And i can certainly vouch that it was not designed as such. I’m posting these notices not because i believe in them, but because people are sending them around as though they are true, which i would arguet they are not at all.
I create a new email address for every site I sign up too and have yet to get spam at the friendster address. We’ll see if that changes…
I heard the founder interviewed on NPR the other day, and I do not think that Friendster is an email address harvesting scheme. According to him, they have been building up critical mass to evolve into a for-fee connection service.
You can join dating services such as Match.com for free, but as soon as you want to actually email another member, you have to become a paying subscriber. It sounds like Friendster is aiming to do the same thing, but without limiting itself to dating.