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::
“It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know: Work in the Information Age” is a paper by Bonnie Nardi, Steve Whittaker and Heinrich Schwarz (circa 2000).
We discuss our ethnographic research on personal social networks in the workplace, arguing that traditional institutional resources are being replaced by resources that workers mine from their own networks. Social networks are key sources of labor and information in a rapidly transforming economy characterized by less institutional stability and fewer reliable corporate resources. The personal social network is fast becoming the only sensible alternative to the traditional “org chart” for many everyday transactions in today’s economy.
This is a great paper by very respectable researchers, revealing some of the reasons that there is such motivation to empower individual’s use of their social network.
Glossosaurus wants to create T-Shirts of the Friendster profiles of random users.
[More coverage and discussion at boingboing]
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?
My hair has always been my playground. I make a mess out of it, change its color, chop it to bits and am constantly trying to figure out how to make it represent me; it continues to fail. Yet, all told, i can cope with the mop on top of my head. Of course, every couple of months, i contemplate the idea of dreading my hair. I have to admit that i love the cyberpunk raver aesthetic – a mix of colors, dreads, dirt and and flare. While i’ve buzzed my head every few years, i’ve never managed to dread the growth that emerges post-buzz.
Today, a friend sent me a link to an article entitled “Raver Revolution: Before West Coast dance music ‘tribes’ get political, they’d better clean their toilets.” ::sigh:: Taking a look at the first image on the page, i don’t think that everyone appreciates this aesthetic as much as i do.
In all seriousness, this article is actually interesting beyond just my reflections on my relationship with my hair. It discusses the emergence of “tribes” in reference to Burning Man / DJ culture and questions the power of this movement.
Forbes just published an interesting piece about online culture in South Korea, arguably the most wired society in the world, where access to broadband is unprecedented and even your parents know what avatars are. If this is what our high-speed future looks like in the U.S., we should be thankful the bottom fell out of the telecom industry.
“When the Slammer virus shut down Internet service for several hours in Korea in January, the whole country suffered from withdrawal symptoms, says Ken Lee, chairman of Korea Telecom, the nation’s biggest broadband provider. Some 10% of the general population and 40% of 13- to 18-year-olds are addicted to the Net, says Dr. Kim Hyun Soo, 37, head of Korea’s professional society for psychologists specialized in treating Internet addiction. “I have seen kids who have not left the house for two years,” he says. ”
Acute lack of irony: the kid in the article who is punished for stealing money from his parents to accessorize his avatar can’t surf the net past midnight and is forced to spend time with his family . . . watching TV.
Is Identity About Ownership or Assertion? is an article by Eric Norlin as part of the DigitalIDWorld conference. Summary: “The Digital Identity ecosystem is a large one. One of the corners of that ecosystem is the “social software” movement. Many of the individuals and companies involved in social software talk about identity in terms of ownership. In this article, Eric examines whether the power of identity lies in ownership or assertion…”
My problem with this article is that Eric doesn’t ground what he’s referring to when he talks about idenitity. From my definition of “idenity” there’s no question about who owns identity. Identity can only be owned by the individual, because it is far more than simply the validity that someone exists. The problem is that most people think of identity as what facets people present, what data people produce, and what bits can provide authentication. The thing is that identity can’t be copied and stored, but the pointers to and output of one’s identity can be.
Also, when it comes to the power of assertion regarding one’s identity, everyone must read Judith Donath’s “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.”
The Unspoken of Groups is a recapitulation of David Weinberger’s ETech talk. In it, Weinberger talks about the problems with articulating one’s identity in sites like Friendster as well as contemplating the power of groups in digital social interaction.
Friend of a Friend was a panel on NPR with Jonathan Abrams (Friendster), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), and Duncan Watts (researcher).