Friendster.com
April 11, 2004
Independent on Sunday (London)
By Malaika Costello-Dougherty
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Things started innocently. I had moved to San Francisco, was
unemployed, short of friends, and someone I knew told me about
Friendster. I dropped hints and she sent me an invitation. And so the
madness began.
Let me explain. Friendster.com launched a year ago in the United States
and catching up quickly in the UK, is designed to exponentially expand
your address book without exposing you to weirdos. It achieves this by
allowing you to contact only friends of friends. When I joined it was four
degrees - my friends' friends' friends' friends. This gave me an immediate
network of about 60,000 through friendster number one, but that quickly
grew. At my maximum, I had 47 friendsters and about 860,000
connections.
Your greeting card is your profile. There is room for photos, descriptions
"about me" and "whom I want to meet". But the most important area is
your list of friendsters, and the testimonials they write about you. By
reading testimonials, I've learnt about people's sex habits, drug use,
ambitions and what their partner thinks of them. And then, of course, you
read what people say about you. I can't understand why one of my
friends described me as an "emergency".
I was soon spending hours a day on Friendster. I dodged the empty
feeling by gazing at the city lights and wondering if there was a job, flat
and boyfriend somewhere for me by inhabiting a world in which I could
believe I was one click away from everything I needed. My mum
encouraged me. Like a lot of Americans, she's a believer in the power of
"weak ties" - friends of friends - and felt that more of these would improve
my chances of hearing about a job.
I started soliciting friendsters with a vengeance. I looked up long- lost
friends, researched professional contacts, poached other people's lists.
Appearances in cyberspace are no less open to prejudice than in the real
world, and I wanted to look popular. I came across one guy I'd known 10
years before and he quickly got down to harassing me. But even he is still
on my list of friendsters - it would have seemed rude to cut him off and,
more importantly, I would have lost a branch of connections.
Soon narcissism took over - if I just got more testimonials, I would see
myself as others do. It never occurred to me that other people made
things up; that hour after hour spent reading about people I hardly knew
was not really building up to anything; that rather than creating a life I was
avoiding one.
I'm still looking for a job, flat and boyfriend and, though I am more aware
of its limitations, I still check Friendster, hoping these elusive wants might
have materialised. That somehow, on-line, I have finally found community.
I know I need the modern network of weak ties and I guess I've always
had a weakness for imaginary friends.
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