Current Addiction: Friendster
With a painfully lame name such as Friendster, you’d probably never visit this domain unless someone threatened you, yet, this social networking site has gone viral with my group of friends in the past week.
The competitive differentiator for Friendster is that you can’t see anyone on the network until you add an actual ‘real’ friend. Once you’ve added someone, you inherit all of their relationships — this means that networks grow amazingly quick… I’ve added 8 friends and my personal network (personal?) includes over 8000 people.
I’ve been wandering around 2nd order friends for a day or so… these are people one step removed from my 1st order friends. I believe the theory is that there is a high probability I should get along with these people.
[3/22/03 Update]: Like any good virus, Friendster burned hot and rapidly burned out. The servers are consistently unreliable and now that I’ve established a group of “friends” there is no real compelling reason for me to go back… which I can’t… since the servers are so damned slow.
