gothamist [2 July 2003] – asks what are the Friendster protocols and social norms?
Phil Gyford [23 December 2002] – Friendster vs. FOAF
Jeremy Zawodny [8 May 2003] – Linked In vs. Friendster
Matthew Linderman [18 June 2003]
“The cult certainly seems to be growing in my neck of the woods. I didn’t even know what it was until a couple of weeks ago and now I hear it mentioned often. Interestingly, it’s usually by non-techies that I would never expect to use such a service.”
jenn doppleganger [8 March 2003] – motivation behind meeting someone from Friendster (and comments include people who want to collapse the network)
estree [19 May 2003] – play with the system as a way to waste time at work or get a good laugh; uncertainty about receiving messages from people, but excitement at finding good looking boys
ben hammersley [18 December 2002] – “like Ebola, but nice.”
“Memes are great: sometimes they slap you on the back of the head, and the other times they simmer gently until the room is full of steam. One of the latter appears to be Friendster to which I was alerted to yesterday by a joining invite from Matt Jones. Now signed up, I get two more invites in quick succession. Viral? the damn thing’s an epidemic.”
azeem.azhar.co.uk [18 December 2002]
Azeem compares Friendster with its predecessor, Six Degrees. Six Degrees collapsed under its own wait; Azeem notes how fast and cute Friendster is (note date).
“The value of Friendster is that it has got us excited again. It isn’t the killer application for the social network. But it is another attempt to find that application.”
“It toys with serendipity. It has some exploratory tools. But it is still a centralised system. It still imposes a cost to create a presence and maintain that presence. And it has yet to prove–althought it may yet prove–functionality and utility over the long-run.”
After someone noted that he added the author in his comments, he responded with: “But i don’t know who you are!! since friendster is for dating, i want to make sure i can really vet everyone on my list…. i wouldn’t want my friends being stalked…. okay. okay. i’ll add you!”
iwire [17 December 2002]
“Very useful for the forgetful; but what exactly is the point? All of this either duplicates functionality already available by (a) knowing who your friends are and what they look like or (b) using e-mail and other more basic ways of keeping in touch. At the margin (and if the network is big enough) it might be useful for getting introductions to people other people know, but even that is questionable.”
“All of those capital letters and all that FUN do hide a decent point point, namely that there are occasional costs and barriers involved in friends introducing their friends to other friends. But that doesn’t mean that an all encompassing friends web-site is the best way to overcome them. Instead, it reflects the fact that most people have different groups of friends because their friends don’t have much in common anyway.”
“So, a muse for the day: social networking tools tend to be used by people who like social networking tools to show off to other people who are interested in social networking tools. Basically, its network bragging.”
blackbeltjones [17 December 2002]
“has accounted for a major dip in productivity in our office. Unlike previous social network building apps like sixdegrees or ryse there is something about it which is incredibly compelling.
Is it:
The ease of use of the well-considered IA and user-interface?
The photos?
The “privacy of the mall” feeling of a private public place that you feel confidence in?
The fact it’s not dressed up in “personal-productivity” speak and is just obviouslly about reinforcing and discovering social ties, and, ahem… dating?”
An odd collection of blog entries about Friendster (in the process of collecting various notes)
Technovia [2 Jan 2003] – thoughts on the media-centric view of Friendster interests (with lots of good commentary by others)
K-Collector’s RSS feed on Friendster [10 June – 3 July 2003] – Marc Canter/Ross Mayfield’s comments
{ Fire & Ice } [6 June 2003] – self-criticism for posting about Friendster, comments on parodies, articles and FOAF
non-literal [30 May 2003] – discusses what groups of people he sent Friendster invites to, desired shared interest site and references his longer rant about the amount of effort necessary to make these valuable
I could never switch webhosting services because no one but Glenn (Netspace) would tolerate my ability to break everything consistently (and hog huge amounts of their bandwidth with my Ani DiFranco lyrics site). And always through what seems to be a quiet, calm, non-intrusive tasks. It’s not like i’m writing scripts that are getting out of control, or anything.
Today, i needed to find a few emails from my 2002 mail archive. So, of course, the first thing i do is gunzip. Well, i’m too close to my quota so it barfed. I wanted to untar it to find out what i had destroyed in the process. Couldn’t untar in my directory so i moved it to /tmp (forgetting that i should move it to /var/tmp instead). tar -xvf and it pukes. I think it’s all corrupted, but really, it just used up all of /tmp. Oops. So, i sent a message to see what i had done wrong. Yet, apparently, my abuse of /tmp caused a bunch of processes elsewhere on the system to fail and eventually caused a httpd process to spiral out of control and hog everything else on the system.
::sigh:: What’s a girl to do?
Of course, last time, a small glitch in my .procmail crashed the entire box continuously. OOps.
My favorite was that at Brown, i used to be able to crash the main file server by printing. Of course, they sysadmins there responded by creating a printing script which basically said “if uid=’dmb’ { break; } else { print(); }”
As i become more and more focused on my research on social networks, i realized that i want my primary blog to be arbitrarily focused, but have a specific site dedicated to all of the bits and pieces of what i’m researching.
Thus, here commences a danah blog on social network tools and their evolution.
Early blog entries are some of the more recent Friendster entries from my more personal blog
The vagina monoliths: Stonehenge was ancient sex symbol
I love the fact that “The Vagina Monologues” has reached the cultural linguistic status to allow for alterations to make a point.
I’m starting to remember that i’m not invincible and can’t do everything even if it looks doable on paper. Somehow, i’m working around the clock on top of handling registration for the conference this week (Altered States and the Spiritual Awakening if you don’t know about it).
And i haven’t even really coped with the reality that i’m moving in under 2 weeks except to have pretty vicious anxiety nightmares. I’m so psyched to move in with my friends and i truly hope that this is my last move for years to come.
Next comes SIGGRAPH, which i haven’t even begun to cope with. Somehow, i need to get to San Diego (i think i’m roadtripping). Somehow, i need to write a presentation. Somehow, i need to come up with a video.
Egads. What do i get myself into?
TouchGraph LiveJournal Browser V1.0 is a cool visualization tool for Live Journal social networks.
Spam sucks. Zephyr must shortly retire. In comes apophenia, thanks to worthless word of the day.
apophenia: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things; seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist
This word was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 in a Jungian context, but has regained currency due to William Gibson’s recent novel, _Pattern Recognition_.(you may remember Gibson as the author of the seminal cyberpunk tale, _Neuromancer_)
“There must always be room for conicidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of consipracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, [Cayce] knew, took for granted was there.” William Gibson, _Pattern Recognition_