Entrepreneur’s idea helps connect people: A UK article on Friendster.

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I would like to highlight one of the comments posted in reference to Friendster censoring images. Mer quite succinctly reflects the problem with Friendster’s decision to censor – namely the arbitrary nature of it. In her post, she raises concern that Friendster is willing to censor images arbitrarily, but does not censor messages that could be construed as hate or harassment (or their senders). It will be interesting to see what the implications of their haphazard use of censorship will be.

Ethan Watters (author of upcoming book “Urban Tribes”) has an article in the San Francisco Magazine Online called “Who’s in Your Tribe?” overviewing Friendster.

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Recently, i’ve been engaged in conversations about behaviors that occur on LiveJournal in relation to the articulated “Friends” element that occurs in many social network systems.

one i call crossfriending. it happens when people meet across mailing lists or other forums. they add each other and their friends list slowly converge after people talk to each other on the fringe overlaps.

the other i call social friending. it used to be that you went to a convention and met people. if you liked them, you would trade addresses (and probably lose them), phone numbers or even cities of origin. then came email addresses. but now you have a livejournal account and all that has to be remembered is a short line of text. the rest – location, domain, identity – is encoded in the address.

what’s interesting to watch is when people meet at local events and add each other afterwards. the jump in connections may take up to a week, but it’s actually visible and measurable.

This type of behavior on LJ could easily be describe Friendster connections as well.

On Friendster, one often sees fake characters that operate as connectors due to a shared interest in a given topic. Simpsons fans might all link to Bart. Likewise, you see “urban tribe” connectors (members of Infinite Kaos connect with the character o the similar name). I’ve also seen alumni characters (Brown University is the one fake character i link to). What made me happy this morning is how explicit people are getting about the purpose of these connecctors.

Black is a character on Friendster whose “about me” profile reads:

Hey ladies, Black is a connector node on the network, not a real person. The sole purpose of this profile page is to create a place where black women seeking women can find each other easily on the Friendster network. If someone suggested a match for you and Black, and you’re interested in adding your profile to the list of fine-ass sistas in Black’s friend list, then add Black Women (first name Black, last name Women) right now! We want to meet you! You can also use blackgirlfriendster@yahoo.com to add Black Women.

Of course, this presents a very interesting situation re: Friendster’s dating model. Black is purposely there to help the dating process, but it also collapses the network. Good? Bad? Appropriate only because the number of people identifying with Black will be small?

Another message is going around on Friendster message boards:

A friend of a friend, who works at the NSA, said that the homeland security department has subpoenaed friendster’s database to weasel out ‘suspected terrorists’. are any of your “friends” on THE LIST???

of course friendster runs on 56k modems… read the front page of the privacy policy. and, horrors if anyone monetizes anything we actually like or use

::sigh::

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.

Many “community” sites allow users to upload pictures as part of their profiles. These pictures are often required to be non-pornographic (can’t let the kiddies see porn) and must be images of the individual profiled (can’t allow for copyright violation). I received an email today from a Friendster user who had her image removed from Friendster for being deleted as a violation of their policies.

This brings up an interesting issue. What does it mean for these sites to censor images? There are two categories of images that they must not allow: porn and copyrighted material. As we all know, porn’s legal definition is simply a judge’s statement “i know it when i see it.” Copyright is a bit clearer, but the question is how to determine whether or not an image is copyrighted unless the copyright owner notes that it is not part of the public domain and thus must be removed.

By choosing to censor images in the grey area, Friendster is putting itself in a really questionable realm. By monitoring this material, they are declaring what is appropriate speech and extending a public statement that they are responsible for what is on their system. That’s an interesting and precarious position.

For those who are interested, the image in question is a photoshopped portrait of the woman depicted in the profile. Upset with Friendster’s decision, she attempted to contact Friendster. To no avail. She wrote again. No response, no action. From her letter:

My primary profile photo is suddenly “not approved”. I’m very curious to know why. May I contest its removal?

“We suggest you upload a high-quality photo of yourself that is clear and current.”

The “Zombie” photo I was using until somebody (I guess with differing aesthetic opinions) reviewed it is both current and clear, and is most definitely ME, simply with photoshop color-enhancements.

The guidelines themselves state that “your photo may be as creative as you like.” Having read this, I see no reason why my main profile picture was taken down. I’m not exposing any naughty bits or using profanties. There are no children or animals in the photo, nothing forbidden by your site. Granted, it’s an odd photo, but it’s an expression of who I am, and it hurts no one.

Friendster’s lack of response to her objection to their policy is also quite interesting. Given that the site is censoring material, what responsibility does it have to correct its own mistakes and poor judgement?

This situation is a clear reminder of why trouble is brewing when an external source tries to maintain and “own” one’s profile, social network and presentation of self. In privatized spaces, is there such a thing as freedom of speech?

Dan Brickley’s comment on an earlier post reminds me that i’ve never even introduced the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) Project. Part of this is because i’ve heard so many conflicting stories about what FOAF is and what FOAF is not that i feel too naive to properly address it.

To the best of my understanding, FOAF is a document framework that would allow you to articulate categories of and relations between people and information.

As Dan noted in his comment, FOAF poorly addresses the nuances of relationships between people. Because they couldn’t determine how to weight or contextualize the relations between people, they went with a standard “knows” relationship (similar to Friendster/Ryze, etc.). Of course, this is certainly the easiest approach, but it fails to truly capitalize on the value of nuanced relationships.

Dan continues on to remind us that FOAF is a distributed document type that has both its strengths and disadvantages. This is where i see FOAF as *potentially* having a great advantage. As a distributed tool, FOAF can easily be connected to one’s functional behavior and not simply rely on their strength in articulating their social network. What i mean is that if one is able to maintain the actual document of their relationships, it could easily be generated by their email/IM/SMS/phone behavior.

People know how to contextualize their relationships to others; they do so regularly through their behavior. The biggest weakness in Friendster is that it expects people to articulate their relationships. People are *dreadful* at this. So much of relationships is about showing face, about having relationships that are purely for mutual advantage and have nothing to do with liking one another. Professional friendships out of need. Yet to say that these relations are equivalent to that of one’s lover or one’s mother or one’s actual friends is utterly foolish. To suggest that people want to connect all of their friends with all of their other friends is naive.

My hope is that the FOAF folks will figure out how to move away from articulated social networks and emerge as a tool for people to evolve their networks through behavior. Of course, this will also require a level of privacy and non-publicness that is not currently in any of the FOAF specs i’ve seen or heard about.

In order to make certain that i capture as much information as possible through this blog, i’ve welcomed Jen King to share this space with me. Thus, she may pop up occasionally as an additional voice here. Jen is a really smart character who is also fascinated by how people construct and maintain “community.”