The NYTimes says that i have 278 Friendster friends. The thing about this number is that i actually know all of them and only 3 of them have i never spent extensive time with in RL (research friends who i have had deep interactions with online, but not offline). Most of these people share significant bonds with me and i’ve been pretty vigilent about sticking to the “desired” Friendster behavior in this way. (Basically, i have no desire to be killed since i need this account for research.)<\/p>\n
I actually maintain multiple accounts. One of them, with my real name, is not linked to anyone. I created it in case old friends wanted to find me. Ironically, all of the requests to that account have been subjects, people who have answered my survey or others that i don’t know at all. Since the NYTimes article came out, i’ve received over a dozen Friendster requests from people who i don’t know at all (in addition to the emails of people asking me to be their friend and the 1 request via my used Friendster account).<\/p>\n
Frankly, given this, i’m amazed that anyone can think that Friendster is an accurate portrayal of social networks. To many of these people, i’m just another name in the paper, one that’s known to have a large network. Thus, they link to me. I’m the perfect candidate to expand people’s networks, right? So strange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The NYTimes says that i have 278 Friendster friends. The thing about this number is that i actually know all of them and only 3 of them have i never spent extensive time with in RL (research friends who i have had deep interactions with online, but not offline). Most of these people share significant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}