I was guessing that the average age on Friendster was 28 and that it was 50/50 (fe)male. I wasn’t far off. In the Anchorage Daily News, Jonathan reported that the average age is 27 and that it’s 52% men.

A friend in need may be a friend online

Sunday, September 7, 2003

By Josh Niva

Anchorage Daily News

Mandy Yam has friends — lots of friends. Hundreds of thousands of friends, in fact. She has best friends, fair-weather friends and friends she hasn’t even met yet. These friends reside in high, low and in-between places.

A 21-year-old journalism student at University of Alaska-Anchorage, Yam has been a dedicated member of the Friendster.com community since May. In that time, she’s reconnected with an old high school pal, stayed connected with a group of college friends in California, made an unbelievable number of new acquaintances and even found out she’s connected to a celebrity.

“I’m one degree away from Flubber,” Yam said with a chuckle. “How did that happen?” It’s easy when one’s personal network of friends totals more than 300,000, as Yam’s Friendster account did last week.

“And I just invited six more people (to join) today,” she said.

The world is not only more connected, it’s a friendlier place thanks to Friendster, a free “social networking” Web site that has the cyber-universe atwitter. More than 1.6 million users have joined Friendster since its launch in March, and it has quickly become a pop culture phenomenon.

“We definitely intended to create a really cool service that everyone could enjoy,” said Friendster creator Jonathan Abrams from his Sunnyvale, Calif., office, “but it’s still overwhelming when it takes off like this.”

Abrams developed the Friendster idea after following the trend of popular yet “random, creepy and anonymous” dating sites. “In real life, you meet people through your friends,” he said.

Unlike dating sites, Friendster is a “relationship-optional” site that is truly “friend-friendly.”

Friendster users create, browse and communicate through detailed personal profiles, which include basic statistics and likes along with pictures and even testimonials written by friends. Users can only browse profiles within their “personal network,” which is developed through existing friendships. Users build connections by inviting others to join as friends. Once a friendship is formed, a personal network expands by adding the friends’ collected friends. (Think six degrees of separation, only Friendster connections go four deep.)

That’s not to say Friendster isn’t an effective matchmaking tool. Yam said a friend in California met her boyfriend using Friendster, and Abrams gets e-mails all the time about successful Friendster hook-ups.

Yam and Cheryl Basto of Barrow, Alaska, have each made another type of special connection using Friendster. They have had cyber reunions with long-lost friends. Yam found an old friend who lives in California. Distant cousins tracked down Basto, 29, who recently tracked down a friend who moved to the Philippines five years ago.

“That’s the really cool thing, and we’ve heard a lot of that,” Abrams said.

Abrams said the average user age is 27, and the community is composed of 52 percent men. Abrams was Friendster’s first registered user and now has 155 friends and a “pretty big” personal network. “But the whole idea is quality, not quantity,” he said.

Tell that to Yam, who has compiled an impressive list of 55 friends and built a personal network empire of 327,685 connections. She said 45 of her “friends” are “close friends”; none are strangers — even Flubber.

Friendster itself is growing by the thousands each day. Abrams said 550,000 users joined the community in the past month, and his staff of “less than 10” is having a difficult time keeping up. The site has suffered technical glitches due to the user overload, and Abrams is so understaffed he’s forced to handle much of the company’s marketing and public relations duties.

With any popular trend comes backlash, and Friendster has faced plenty.

One common complaint among many users is people who collect friends and personal networks strictly for statistical or ego reasons.

“I don’t like that some treat Friendster like a competition,” Basto said on an e-mail.

“I saw someone with 141 friends — 141? Geez!” Yam added. Other user complaints come from the rash of “fakesters” who create bogus profiles or upload phony pictures. The Friendster staff hunts and deletes any suspicious profiles daily. There has even been a handful of spoof sites developed in recent week, such as Enemyster, Fiendster and Introvertster.

It’s also been reported that Friendster will soon charge users to navigate the site. Abrams said that’s only partly true. The company is considering charging a monthly fee for users to communicate with others who aren’t friends (probably less than $10), but Abrams said posting profiles, browsing and messaging between friends will remain free.