Jack Boulware

Tollecting friends online has never been so easy—and so, I don’t know, ephemeral?

The Friendster Phenomenon

The concept of meeting people online has been around since us wee mortals first started using the internet way, way back in the 1990s. I’ve never bothered to really investigate such possibilities, other than to occasionally click on the personal ads that accompany websites like Salon, Nerve, or The Onion. Just to see who’s doing it. Turns out it’s the same people who place personal ads in weekly newspapers. Except with photos.

And now we have Friendster. Over two million people have joined this online community since it launched five months ago, and it’s all the buzz. Unlike the others, Friendster creates personal networks for each user, so you can see how your friends are connected to other friends. You also get to post up to five photos of yourself, instead of just one. You can ask to be someone’s friend, and then become part of their network, or people will ask to be your friend, and become part of yours. And while Yahoo or Match.com will charge a fee, Friendster is completely free. So what’s the big deal? I have to see for myself.

Nobody can just join Friendster. You have to be invited. My friend Cynthia says, “Sure, I’ll invite you to be my friend.” I thought we were already friends, but whatever. She sends me an email, I click on the link, register a password, and now I’m officially a Friendster friend. I fill out the bare minimum who-am-I questions and start my personal network. Since it contains only me, that gets old in about 1.5 seconds, so I look at Cynthia’s network of 31 friends, each with a little photo, and recognize several people I know. I click on their pages, scroll through the photos, and read their favorite books and movies. Below each person’s profile is a list of testimonials from friends. All very well and good. But I want more.

I spend the next eight hours at the computer, forgetting to eat, clicking madly through the site, surfing through endless friend networks of Burning Man geeks and goths and rockers and computer nerds and gays and club kids and cyber-intellectuals and a zillion other people, bouncing around the globe from California to New York, Tokyo, London. I come across profiles of comedian Margaret Cho, musicians Tom Waits and Kim Deal. Friendster is incredibly addictive, a brilliant time-waster for people who work at computers. Some users are obviously trolling for dates, others say they’re looking for friends or “activity partners,” and still others say they’re “just here to help.” A few list over 400 friends in their network. Many users post photos of themselves in costume at Burning Man. Lots of snapshots with friends, laughing and clutching cocktails at a party. Close-up images of eyeballs and lips, a few sex-kitten poses.

According to Friendster CEO Jonathan Abrams, the average Friendster is around 27, and split 50-50 between male and female. Abrams started the service in 2002 from his apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly because he saw that other personal sites were anonymous and random, and kind of creepy. “I noticed that in real life, my friends prefer to meet people through their friends,” he tells me. “I came up with the idea for a service where you could meet people online through your friends.”

Demand was so great at first, it crashed the Friendster servers. Today it spans dozens of countries, with particularly high numbers in Malaysia and the Philippines. A reality TV show is rumored to be on the horizon, and this September, over $1 million in investment came from former executives of Yahoo, PayPal and Amazon. Abrams insists there’s no secret to its success: “People like their friends, so it’s a network through your friends, which is a very fast way to grow. It’s fun, it’s easy to use, and it’s about people. It’s a natural thing that people have found useful and fun.”

I read through more profiles. Friendster strikes me as an alternative universe of highly evolved sovereign organisms, where people listen to only really cool music and watch only really cool movies. Everyone is hyper-smart, witty, ironic, and, of course, looking for same. One person even refers to himself as an “itinerant philosopher.” The friend testimonials border on the ridiculous. A friend of “Naomi” calls her the hottest, geekiest, smartest robotic girl she has ever met: “I bathe in the ever-present glow of her shiny metallic transistor synapses firing in their clear plastic shells, the firework lightly dancing in red and blue.” Naomi sounds like a one-woman Fourth of July. Another user named Ben is described as “a magical being from another dimension who can suddenly appear anywhere around the globe. His intellectual powers cannot be quantified on any traditional scale.” Who is this Ben, and why is he not consulting for U.S. foreign policy? Others are more to the point: “Darrin has a look that says shake my hand and I’ll rip it off your body.” “Becky is so cute and always waves at your when she passes by your desk.” Or the succinct: “Jennifer is awesome!”

I ask a few offline friends about their experiences. Cynthia Wood, my first Friendster friend, works in publishing, and says she was invited by a friend writing a book about urban tribes. She’s invited 15 people so far, and likes the six degrees of separation idea of connecting to other people. A few guys have asked her out, and she met one for a drink, but now has a boyfriend, whom she did not meet on Friendster. Another friend, a journalist named Elise Proulx, joined because two people invited her to join on the same day. “I felt some sort of peer pressure,” she admits. “I barely put any info about myself and didn’t have a photo up for months.” Elise has found the site helpful to locate old friends and co-workers, but also has a boyfriend, so it isn’t about dating for her. My friend Nick Tangborn, who owns the Jackpine Records label, joined to see who else was doing it, and also because “it appealed to the vain, egocentric part of me.” He has 83 friends in his network, and likes tracking down old friends, but doesn’t look for dates because he’s married. Nick’s first impression of Friendster “was like a high school yearbook, with the testimonials, except you get to pick your picture, instead of the one your mom likes.”

But still, I can’t find a reason to start bothering people to be my friend. You’re supposed to send them an email to solicit friend approval, and it sounds so desperate and pathetic. Do I really want to start collecting friends like baseball cards? People who live in cities I’ll never visit? How many friends can you have before it takes over your life? Why am I doing this?

And then I come upon the photo of the kitten.

Not just any kitten. This cute little calico is holding a huge pistol, pointing it out of a window like a sniper. It’s a subtle, hilarious image, and supposedly is the personal photo of a young woman from Spain. I start noticing other photos like this, and realize that there are a lot of people on Friendster who are just plain liars. Several users list their age as 83, or post photos of Bill Clinton, Archie Bunker, and Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. Others invent whole phony personas, of everyone from Maharishi Yogi to Cyndi Lauper, Bart Simpson, Eddie Money, the Hamburgler, David Lee Roth, and Gregory Peck. When I search for people from San Francisco, I discover the Transamerica Pyramid has joined Friendster, and the building is actually a 31-year-old male, whose favorite music is the Donnas, CCR, and Tom Waits. The Golden Gate Bridge is apparently female, and her favorite movies are The Hulk and Star Trek IV, but no favorite books, because “bridges tend to be illiterate.” Nick Tangborn recalls reading through an intense flame war on Friendster between a lobster and a crow. Several users have put their Friendster friendship up for auction on eBay.

This creative anarchy is frowned upon by Abrams and Friendster, because the pranks clog up the company’s servers. Membership has been terminated for many high-volume Fakesters, from Dave the Dog, a dog running for governor of California, to God the Almighty, a user boasting over 1,000 friends. Claiming unfair censorship, the Fakester backlash has spread to create parody websites like Fiendster and Enemyster, even an online repository for all animal Fakesters kicked off Friendster. Former and new users are drifting to newer competitors like Tribe.net, as well as deep-pocket online communites like Ryze and Emode.

But Friendster is miles ahead in total users and brand recognition. Abrams insists the Fakesters aren’t worth discussing. “It’s actually a pretty small number,” he says. “Percentage wise it’s pretty low. Since we’re a young company we don’t have our customer service staffed up fully yet.”

I stay away from Friendster for the next few weeks. I’ll be traveling for much of the time, and also I’m tired of clicking through the equivalent of walking down a hallway in high school. When I log on and check my Friendster account again, not one person has emailed me. If only I were the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d have a lot more friends.

(First published in Southwest Spirit magazine)