Here’s a great feature-style article on Friendster that shares anecdotes similar to what i’ve seen.

Note the Buzzlife community memorializing one of its own through Friendster. (When you can search on Friendster again, check out Sean Wisniewski’s profile.)

Friends for (Cyber) Life

By Eliza Barclay

Friendster Put The Buddy List on Steroids; Now It’s Making The Leap From Your PC Screen to The DC Scene.

It’s 1:30 a.m. and Ky has just rolled up to the Navy Yard club Nation to make his appearance at CBIK, the new event organized by the world-famous weekly DJ event Buzz. Chances are that Ky knows more that a few people inside the club. In fact, it is likely that Ky knows over 100 of the people milling around with Red Bull and vodkas or water bottles in hand. Though Ky has lived in the area for 9 years, he has only been active on the DC nightlife scene for two years. One of the keys to Ky’s social empire-aside from his outgoing nature-is undoubtedly Friendster.
Friendster is a web site that allows people to establish, link, and build upon their social circles through the internet. Founded by Silicon Valley-based engineer and entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams, the service is based upon the concept of six degrees of separation; members become electronically and then visually connected to their friends and everyone else within their friends’ social sphere.

How It Works

Users register for free and fill out a profile with the option to include up to five photos. Depending on who has already joined or entered in their email addresses to invite them to join, Friendster automatically attaches friends’ profiles to each other. The result is that in pulling up a profile, everyone connected to the individual is visible with their individual profiles accessible to their friends-users can see who their friends’ friends are via their linked profiles and their friends’ friends’ friends and so on.
Beyond photos and profiles, Friendster offers a number of other features that distinguish it from most other attempts at web-based social networks. Users can send email to each other through the site without needing to type in an address, post testimonials visible to everyone about friends below their profiles, post messages to immediate friends on a bulletin board, and view everyone they are connected to in a gallery.
With well over a million users nationwide and thousands of new members joining every month, Friendster has quickly become one of most extraordinary examples of web-based word-of-mouth growth. The DC/Baltimore area is rumored to have the highest number Friendster users in the country (although Friendster’s press office did not respond to confirm this). Friendster’s massive progress has not come without its downfalls; its servers are often overloaded and hamper anyone-no matter how fast their connection speed-from accessing all of the site’s services.

Friendster Extraordinaire

A 31-year-old originally from Houston, Ky is a self-proclaimed Friendster addict. Sometimes he stays up all night long browsing through his friends’ profiles and some of the hundreds of thousands of people in his Personal Network. “Why am I doing this instead of sleeping? It’s fascinating because it’s real people. I can learn about my friends through their profiles,” he said.
For Ky, a champion networker who joined the service in March, Friendster is an absolute goldmine. Ky has over 500 friendsters, but since the system more or less cuts users off at around 500, Ky’s page only shows 495 of his acquaintances. Ky claims to know all of his friendsters, but he also claims to have met at least 250 of them since June. “I met over 1000 people this summer,” said Ky. A devoted club and bar goer, Ky has networked and charmed his way through the maze of DC’s nightlife scene, steadily accruing friendsters along the way.

A Perfect Match

On September 26, Friendster joined forces with Buzzlife Productions to co-sponsor a CBIK/Buzz night at Nation. Club Five, owned by the same parent company as Nation, has also put on Friendster nights to encourage friendsters to come out from behind their screens and make real-life acquaintance with each other. Buzzlife Productions and Club Five have astutely noticed the natural correlation between the regular crowd that attends their events and Friendster users.
The original connection between the DC club community and Jonathan Abrams of Friendster was made in April after the murder of a Buzzlife employee, Sean Wisniewski, in Baltimore. Buzzlife contacted Abrams to request that Wisniewski’s profile on Friendster be kept active. “We used Friendster to help us grieve for Sean. Many people wrote testimonials to memorialize him, and it enabled us to connect with his family and show them how important he was in our community,” said Amanda Huie, PR and Marketing Director for Buzzlife Productions. Yvonne Sayers, a friend of Sean’s and of Buzzlife, continued the friendship with Abrams and was able to summon Friendster’s recent support of Buzzlife and Club Five events.
On the one hand, many Friendster members who also frequent DC’s clubs knew each other before Friendster came along. (The site was officially launched in March 2003, but has been operating unofficially since late 2002.) Still, club promoters recognize Friendster’s role of tightening an already tight-knit community of club goers in the DC area even further.
“As virtual communities grow, there seems to be a real fear about losing real life communities. With Friendster joining up with clubs to put on events, we are helping to bridge that gap by allowing people to meet in person in a safe environment,” said Huie.
Huie explained that the Buzz email list has 3000 members, an indication of how important a role the internet plays in the Buzz following. Many Buzz devotees also regularly post messages to the Buzz message board to notify each other about special events and other developments in DC clubland. “Buzzlife is trying to create a community around music. Friendster works so well for us because it allows you to map your friends and make cross-references to people you may have met or recognize,” said Huie.

Restricted to Clubbers?

Because Friendster offers users the ability to search within their Personal Network for people with similar interests listed in their profiles, it is possible to gauge the diverse pool of users within its 1 million + membership. But Friendster certainly owes some of its original success to already-established online communities like local club communities that have relied since their inception on the internet as the primary means of communication.
According to Simon Pattee, who runs the electro room for CBIK/Buzz nights at Nation, “Friendster is definitely big within other music subcultures, but it is especially within the club scene because we are always online.” Pattee noted that he was aware of the presence of a huge punk/electroclash community in Brooklyn, NY on Friendster.
Outside of music, Bill Luza, a DC-based architect and designer and a member of Ky’s personal network, has noticed Friendster becoming popular within the architecture and design communities, even as a form of business networking. “In art and architecture where you are constantly looking at other people’s work and need that interface, Friendster offers simplicity. It’s an easy way to put up links to your work for other people to see,” commented Luza.

Friendster for Mates?

Certainly, people utilize Friendster’s networking capacity in a variety of different ways.
The email that goes out from Friendster members to potential friendster friends reads: “Friendster is an online community that connects people through networks of friends for dating or making new friends.” But many would argue its uses extend far beyond dating and forging new friendships.
According to Troy Dayton of Boulder, Colo., another one of Ky’s friendsters, Friendster’s marketing scheme oriented towards dating may even be hurting its success. “There are definitely people who are turned off by the notion of Friendster as a dating service. I think Friendster is fantastic for getting to know the people I already know. I see different sides to my good friends’ personalities through their profiles,” Dayton said.
Luza, on the other hand, will chalk up his current relationship to Friendster. One night, Luza happened to see an unfamiliar woman hanging out with some of his friends, but was never introduced. Several days later, he saw her again sitting at a table at Gazuza in Dupont Circle with another mutual friend. When he returned to his office that day, he found a message on Friendster from the woman saying, “I saw you!” She had recognized and then located him via Friendster. “When people ask how we met,” said Luza, “we sort of laugh and say, Mutual friends!'”

Friendsters Forever

While the internet social world has been proliferating at an enormous speed, tapping into romance, business, recreation, education, and nearly all socially-oriented elements of life, there is still somewhat of a gap for many people who’d rather not participate.
Some perceive the cyber social realm as creepy or only suitable for desperate people unable to make connections in real life. For others, cyber society is a godsend for networking. Whatever the perception, there are few web trends that have engulfed so much of an entire demographic as Friendster.
The pool that makes up the Friendster usership is not an exceptionally diverse demographic- mostly white urbanites in their 20s and 30s-but many of them tend more towards alternative lifestyles and away from other cyber social scenes like Match.com. The Friendster empire seems to have been built via shared interests be it music, clubbing, the Burning Man festival in California, or more recently, professional interests like art and architecture. And, of course, it also has evolved from the pure power of friendship.
While Amanda Huie sees Friendster as an ideal way “to market and cement the bonds of the Buzz crowd,” there are scores of other interest groups that are likely beginning to use Friendster as a networking tool in countless different ways. According to Troy Dayton, “Clubbers make up one group that has proved the concept of Friendster in and of itself, but I see it as having the potential to create exponential growth and have a huge impact on communication everywhere.”