[from the connected selves blog]

Wired ran an article today about Making Friendsters in High Places, including quotes by moi (and referencing the eBay phenomenon and Ross’ comparison of different tools).

I must say that i think it’s fascinating to hear people reference each other as Friendsters. “Oh, you’re danah’s Friendster.” This shows how it is not really a listing of your friends, but some other not-entirely-defined set of people that you sorta know in some context or another.

Making Friendsters in High Places By Leander Kahney

02:00 AM Jul. 17, 2003 PT

Friendster, the popular social-networking service that cleverly assimilates real-life social groups into a large virtual network, just keeps getting bigger.

The service, which opened to the public in March and is still in beta, will hit 1 million users this week, and is expanding at a rate of 20 percent a week, according to the company.

“It’s growing exponentially,” said CEO and founder Jonathan Abrams.

Friendster helps users find dates and new friends by referring people to friends, or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends, and so on.

When signing up, users post a picture of themselves and a list of their interests. Crucially, they are also asked to provide a list of their friends and their e-mail addresses. If their friends also sign up, they are asked to confirm their relationship to the inviter. Once these social links are established, users can traverse the entire web of contacts, finding people they’d like to meet and sending them a message.

The service is fun and easy to use, and the invitation feature not only creates a rich web of contacts, it’s also the key to Friendster’s viral growth. In addition, the system of validating social relationships provides a kind of virtual “vouch” that protects participants from random contacts.

Danah Boyd, a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. student researching online social networks, said Friendster is beginning to have an “unbelievable impact” on its target demographic, urban-dwelling 25- to 35-year-olds.

“You go into a club and people are talking about it,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people (talking) about it in a social situation.”

Boyd said the word “friendster” is entering common usage. Just as “googling” has become synonymous with Internet search, she explained, “friendster” is now used to describe a person that someone meets or knows through the network. A friendster is not exactly a friend, but rather an online acquaintance about whom a lot is known, thanks to the degree of disclosure in their social resume, which, of course, may or may not be true.

“Friendster is the new Google,” said Boyd. “When you Google someone, it’s official, like their resume. Friendster is the social element.”

In another indication of its growing cultural influence, Friendster networks are popping up for sale on eBay.

“Meet hipsters, musicians,” promises a seller called sleepnotwork.

Another eBay seller, listed as xxxdtox, claims the winning bidder will be able to join “the very coolest and most exclusive group of peeps inline anywhere.”

Friendster isn’t the only new application catching on in the so-called “social software” realm — a wide array of systems for creating social networks from weblogs to mailing lists. Others include Everyone’s Connected, Ryze, Ecademy and LinkedIn, though the latter two are oriented toward business networking rather than socializing.

Social-software expert Ross Mayfield has written an analysis of how the services differ in terms of how connections are fostered. Ryze users can make contact with any other user. By contrast, Friendster users can contact each other only through friends or friends of friends.

Friend of a Friend, or FOAF, is an attempt to build an open-source alternative to Friendster. The problem is, users have to be technically minded enough to build their own profiles.

In a striking demonstration of Friendster’s ability to connect people, San Francisco programmer Dav Coleman built an interactive visualization of his network of friends — and friends of friends — across the globe.

Coleman’s map of his global social connections shows thousands of points representing people all over the world with whom he shares a social connection.

But the map really comes alive when a series of buttons below it are clicked. Select the Show One Hop button, and a single point in San Francisco is shown representing Coleman himself.

Select the Two-, Three- and Four-Hop buttons, and the globe rapidly fills with Coleman’s friends, their friends and the friends of their friends.

“It’s interesting to see how it grows exponentially as you get three or four hops out,” said Coleman. “Four hops out and the map turns into one big red splotch, especially here in North America.”

Coleman built the map from data obtained from his Friendster network.

The map is just a small subset of Coleman’s Friendster connections. Of the nearly 200,000 Friendster associations, Coleman is mapping about 5,000.

Coleman also used the Blogosphere 2 Java applet, which is designed to create a map of bloggers around the world.

However, Coleman’s application is not for sharing. Coleman built his data set by scraping the Friendster website with a custom-built spider. If others also started scraping the site, it would grind to a halt, he said.

Friendster’s CEO Abrams said the site is just barely coping with current traffic. “Right now we’re concentrating on performance,” Abrams said. “As time goes on, we will add more functionality.”

For example, Abrams said Friendster engineers have built a prototype interface that lets users see their social networks as an array of faces arranged like a spider’s web on their screens. The feature will debut in a month or two, Abrams said.

“There’s a lot more coming,” he said. “This is definitely the beginning of what people will be able to do.”