Time Out New York: “Online social network Friendster.com just may be the most annoyingly cliquey and trendy club since Moomba” (with quotes by moi)
FRIENDSTER OR FOE?
Online social network Friendster.com just may be the most annoyingly cliquey and trendy club since Moomba
By Jennifer Romolini
Illustration by Greg White
“You’ve never eaten a hamburger?” Jonathan Abrams asks, incredulous. Abrams, a former Netscape engineer, is the founder of Friendster.com (www.friendster.com), the online social network where people meet/date/stalk each others’ friends, and he’s surfing through my Friendster profile while talking to me. Usually, when I interview someone over the phone, I have a certain anonymity, but Abrams can see that I’m 30, live in Brooklyn and listen to Johnny Cash. He also knows that I’m in a relationship, so on Friendster, I’m “Just Here to Help,” as opposed to looking for an activities partner, a date or a serious relationship. “What’s up with your picture?” he says, balking at my somewhat obscured (though I thought cute) likeness. “Is this a joke profile?”
It’s not a joke. It’s the real me, or rather, the smartest, wittiest, most appealing cyber-me I could create on the service, filling out fields like About Me and Who I’m Looking For. Abrams’s once-over is part of the fun-or terror, depending on your viewpoint-of joining the Friendster party. It’s the point of it, really. The site, which went up last August, was intended to be a more intimate and discriminating alternative to online dating services such as Match.com and Nerve.com; hookups would be monitored by friends, much as in real life. Friendster has since blown up far beyond its founder’s imaginings. It’s become a wildly popular social yardstick that’s as contagious and fast-moving as SARS. Still in an unfinished, beta form, the site now has 750,000 members in more than 200 countries and is growing at a rate of more than 20 percent a week. It has inspired several parodies-Scenester and Enemyster; Hatester is on the way-and has even spawned its own clothing line (Friendster thong, $12.50).
In Manhattan, where the need to feel connected is almost pathological, Friendster currently claims a 50,000-person network. It’s the new watercooler. It’s taking hold of social lives like kudzu. Go to a dinner party and it’s likely that friends will be talking about Friendster. The site has even become a social activity unto itself. I recently asked an acquaintance, an always-overbooked 32-year-old magazine editor, what she was up to over the weekend. “Surfing Friendster,” she said, with no detectable trace of irony. (Hey, at least hanging out with your Friendsters is free-for now, anyway. When the site officially launches in a few months, membership will likely remain gratis, but there may be a charge for certain services like searching for dates).
If you aren’t on Friendster, it’s because you haven’t been invited to join. Yep, it’s the cyber equivalent of being allowed behind the velvet rope (see “Friendster at a glance”). If you haven’t been invited to join, chances are you’re a social pariah-at least if you consider Friendster the arbiter of popularity. But you probably won’t be out of the loop for much longer. Even defiant anti-Friendsters succumb to the peer pressure. I did, after receiving more than four invitations from different pals. I now have 17 Friendsters, through whom I am connected to yet another 91,440 people. Friendster is indeed a useful networking tool. Beyond making friends, people have used it to score dates, jobs and even apartments. And it’s excellent for satisfying voyeuristic and narcissistic desires. But it can also be an addictive and perilous trap.
It’s too much like high school
Friendster can be as cliquey as a gaggle of seventh-grade girls. In the race to amass the most connections and achieve virtual popularity, the line between “friend” and “Friendster” begins to blur. “I really wasn’t that interested at first, but pretty quickly, I started getting competitive about it in a very high-school sort of way,” admits Robert, a 26-year-old software engineer, adding, “I just wanted to get more Friendsters than other people I knew.” Oftentimes, people who are not your friends in real life ask to become them on the site, and refusing them can be sticky. “I had this one peripheral acquaintance who kept e-mailing me, asking me to be her friend,” says Corky, a 29-year-old Web designer. “I replied with a joke but didn’t approve her request. She kept it up until I was guilted into saying yes.” Such uncomfortable situations occasionally lead to regressive measures. “My friend was really insulted that no one had invited her,” Lisa, a 32-year-old book editor, says. “So I told her my invitation couldn’t get through her antispam system.” Ouch.
It sends egos into overdrive
The more Friendsters one has, the more compulsive one seems to get. As your network expands, the mandate for a witty, quirky, aesthetically pleasing profile escalates. Think of it as “Am I Smart-or Funny or Interesting-or Not,” with people scrambling to have the right books, movies and bands in their profile. Cool Friendsters have lots of hip, hot buddies with good photos, well-written profiles and a slew of testimonials (the warm-and-fuzzy blurbs friends write to attest to one another’s greatness). Insecure Friendsters obsessively edit their profiles in an attempt to emulate those in the in crowd. (I’ve seen one painfully self-conscious user edit her About Me section four times in one day.) They also make wink-nudge references to other Friendsters in their profiles-and even plagiarize. “Maybe I was just being paranoid, but I really felt like this guy was copying me,” Clayton, a 31-year-old, L.A.-based interior and furniture designer, says. “I knew him from another site, Am I Hot or Not, and he asked to be my friend. At first, his profile had very little on it. But the next time I was Friendster surfing, I noticed that he had changed his profile and that it was really similar to mine: same movies, same interests. I didn’t say anything. But it was really weird.” As if there weren’t enough head cases in the real world.
It complicates, rather than abets dating
It used to be, if we wanted to do reconnaissance work on potential mates, we’d Google them. Friendster is a more reliable source of information, because rather than scrutinizing a person’s college thesis, you have firsthand reports from mutual pals to aid you. But Abrams’s vision of a cozy online personals scene, where you meet on the word of your chums, doesn’t really work. For one thing, the site is too much like real-life dating. Friendster is incestuous. There’s not enough privacy in its peer groups. And there’s the fear that if you contact too many people who know each other, there’ll be hurt feelings and awkward moments (remember the swapping-party scene in The Ice Storm?). “The personals are an odds game,” says Jordan, a 32-year-old magazine researcher. “The more people you contact, the better your success rate. But you can’t do that on Friendster. You can’t go through your friends’ friends until you meet someone you like. What if you all wind up at the same barbecue together? Can you imagine how embarrassing that would be?”
Like any dating service, Friendster has the rare success story, and some folks do get a happy ending-of sorts. “I got laid through Friendster last night!” announced a 26-year-old female user, who says that after meeting randomly through the site’s Gallery (where you can search users out of your network by name or e-mail address), she and her mate have now become regular fuck buddies-or is it fuck Friendsters? He’s even added her to his page. “I can totally hypothesize about the other people he’s dating on Friendster based on new testimonials and new friends added. It’s like stalking. It’s fun,” she says. In fact, though others can’t access your personal e-mail address (even if you correspond through the message board), there’s nothing to protect you from stalkers. Barring a mass bulletin like “This guy’s a scumbag,” there’s no system to ward off obnoxious would-be suitors.
Of course, getting laid by a perfect stranger through a personals site isn’t really anything new-the kids on Nerve have been doing it for years. However, it reveals Friendster’s biggest design flaw: Once you’re at four degrees of separation, you’re basically anonymous. “At four degrees, it becomes no different from any other online dating service,” Danah Boyd, a researcher at Berkeley who studies online social networks, confirms. In other words, your Friendsters become useless.
