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.”

I’ve been talking to more and more press lately and one question always comes up “Does Friendster work?” Of course, this is more complicated than any of them want to hear in byte size form. Thus, i’ve never seen any of them reflect my answer. More often than not, what they really want to know is whether or not people use Friendster to date.

The answer is: Of course! The interesting part is how. There are a variety of different usage scenarios.

– People will see someone through their friend’s list and ask the friend about them and encourage their friend to introduce them in RL. Or at least they will ask for their common friend’s opinion before introducing themselves.

– People will recognize familiar strangers and thus have multiple contexts in which to begin a dialogue, online of offline.

– People use it as though it’s Match.com and reach out to effectively strangers with another data point for conversation.

The most interesting usage scenario follows the familiar strangers element. These are people that are recognizable by sight. The viewer sorta knows them (perhaps they are part of the same scene), but has never had a reason to converse. Not only does Friendster provide useful information about a potential date (single status, sexuality, age, etc.), but it provides an additional context in which to start a conversation.

If you see a person in the pub every week, starting a conversation might be challenging. But if you see them on Friendster, you can write to them saying “oh, i see you’re Bob’s friend and i know i recognize you from XXX pub.” Or, conversely, you can go up to them in the pub and say “you’re Bob’s Friendster, right?”

I love this model because it integrates two of Stanley Milgram’s most powerful concepts.

Needless to say, there is a lot of commentary about Friendster on Live Journals. For the most part, it is banter about adding one another as friends. Of course, this brings into question whether or not LJ connections are friends. [In LJ, there are explicit references to “Friendster friends”]

Other interesting bits:

xaotica: used Friendster to connect with a desired journalist gig after a blind contact provided no leads. Also, “it’s a site a little similar to livejournal, minus the journal.”

truna: “friendster = high school yearbook and that’s why i love it ;-)”

yummystuff: chronicles her Friendster dates

brokenchinaldol: “you’ll notice every fifth testimonial seems to include something like ‘i don’t know why we don’t hang out more/i wish we saw each other more/we should keep in touch’. i vote someone makes realster.com, where people admit ‘i don’t call her anymore because all she does is complain about her boyfriend’, ‘we used to hang out in high school, until i develop a little thing called a conscience”, “maybe we should start having casual sex again’. this would certainly help singletons weed out the poor dating choices.”

Anyhow, there are pages and pages of Friendster quotes on LJ.

In case you’re bored, Friendster traffic is really interesting.

One of my roommates finally joined Friendster. Her immediate response was that it was a fun collection of baseball cards of your friends. Of course, she doesn’t like collecting baseball cards…

Free Download of the Day: Friendster

Keep in touch with friends and make new ones with a service that’s like six degrees of separation online.
By Sarah Lane

Editor’s note: TechTV’s fabulous four, Sarah, Jessica, Cat, and Morgan, crashed the very first Friendster party a few days ago and we have the exclusive video. See what happens when online “friends” interact in the real world. It’s geeks gone wild!

So I don’t want to sound like I’m way too popular or anything, but sometimes I feel like I have too many friends. Don’t get me wrong, I love each and every one of them. I have the world’s best friends.

But there aren’t enough hours in the day to give lots of friends the same kind of attention. I’m constantly feeling guilty about neglecting to call someone I should have called last week… or staying home instead of grabbing a drink with a buddy. Do you ever feel that way?

That’s why I love Friendster. It’s one of the most creative online ways I’ve found to keep in touch with friends while simultaneously introducing your friends to friends and making your social circle grander every day!

Here’s how it works

Sign up, fill out your profile, and add a nice little avatar for your pic. If you’ve been invited by someone, that person automatically becomes your friend. If not, you can ask to add someone as your friend provided that person is actually your friend. If they aren’t, they have the option to reject your request to add them to your group. Of course, a real friend wouldn’t do that, so you have nothing to worry about. 😉

Here’s where it gets fun

Once you’ve successfully added a friend, their friends become your friends. Well, not exactly your friends per se, but their information becomes available to you and they show up as New People in your network (kinda like acquaintances). And just like the real world, a few friends equal tons of acquaintances. For example, at the time of this writing I have five friends and 23,207 people in my Personal Network. Wow!

Six degrees of Sarah Lane

One fun game involves clicking on people in my Personal Network and figuring out how I’m loosely connected to them. Example: I know Maly who knows Steven who knows Grant who knows Flank. Of course I probably wouldn’t ever know Flank unless I knew Maly. But now he’s a little more than a stranger to me. I now have the option to contact Flank directly, or ask one of my connections to introduce me. Pretty civilized, huh?

Another feature I really like involves searching my Personal Network through keywords on my own profile. Example: I love Hunter S. Thompson and say so in my “favorite books” section. If I click on that, Friendster searches my network and retrieves other profiles that mention HST. So not only do all these people know somebody who knows somebody who I know, but we now have a common interest!

Friendster can be used for dating purposes, but also has options for those in relationships who aren’t looking for much more than activity partners and new buddies. I really like this site. You can play six degrees of Kevin Bacon with yourself.

Start using Friendster

Your friend,
Sarah

P.S. Be sure to let me know what you think about Friendster in the Talkback section below.

Originally posted May 19, 2003

Joi Ito put together a wiki page to discuss Linked In. This is a great resource for conversations about the topic and responses by Reid Hoffman and others.