My Fiendster Experience An Addict's Perspective I got this email from a woman I'd dated several times. She was hot, fun, smart, all that- but we never hit it off physically and remained just friends. The email was a form invitation to an online community of her friends, for both dating and networking, called Friendster. Normally I don't mess with any kind of online dating stuff- you know what they say about online dating- the odds are good but the goods are odd. Since my friend was so hot and fun and smart and social and all that, I figure she's got lots more friends like her, so I try to log on to this site at www.friendster.com but it says it's currently unavailable. I try again later that afternoon, and manage to log on, and create a user with a password. You're asked to fill out a simple little form questionnaire thingee, no real info other than an email address required. As a user at the site, you have what's called a Profile page, which is the public face you show to the other users on the network. The profile page has an area for a photo, and some inanely generic fields to fill out, like what are your favorite movies, books and tv shows, what kind of job do you have, where do you live, what kind of person would you like to meet, and not much more substantial than that. There's also a home area where you admin your own account from, check your messages from other Friendsters and some other stuff. The really neat thing about this network is that you can only see other users who are friends of friends of friends, a definite play on the six degrees of separation principle. On your profile page is a list of your Friendster friends, and a thumbnail of their photo. Starting off, by invite, I had one friend. Eventually I click on the 'gallery' section of the site, which has several sorting options and is used to peruse the pages of Friendsters in your network. After surfing around I find maybe a dozen folks I actually know in real life on there, wow, so I visit their pages, and click on the 'Add as a friend' button. This sends a message to them, and once they verify that indeed, yes, you are friends, you get added to each other's friends list, and are exposed to each other's network of friends. The more friends you add, the more people in your network you can see. On every user page in your network, you see up to twenty connections to them through the friend of a friend of a friend hierarchy. This is pretty fascinating, to see how everyone is interconnected. Another neat feature about the site is that there's a 'testimonials' section on your profile page, where people you know can write some kind words on your behalf. On the first day I get my first testimonial, from my lady friend who'd invited me on. She puts up a glowing message, saying some stuff that makes me appear all hot and dope, yeehaw. It appears on my page along with her small thumbnail photo image. So I go to her page and attempt to write her a glowing testimonial as well. Later, she'd have me rewrite it to make her appear super duper sexy, I'd started with something more ordinary. This testimonials thing is like a big collective group hug, maddeningly addictive. Suddenly I'm trolling around the network, looking for friends to write up in as flattering and glowing a light as possible. I get pretty good at writing up compliments on the site, and start getting some reciprocal testimonials as well. I'm pretty sure I was up late the first night I was on Friendster, probably really late. Once in awhile something comes along that makes me drop everything, this was a big one of those. I simply could not get enough of this node network that had actual living breathing friends of mine in it. And their friends of friends of friends were, inevitably, surprisingly similar to me. Seeing lots of other artists and musicians and club kids and coders and people who have been to Burning Man, I've worn all of those hats at one time or another. Its like all of a sudden I could not only see the tribes I was peripherally associated with, but tribes that were a step or two removed in real life. Wow. I'm hooked. This is so perfectly in line with the classic 1980s German definition of cyber, by which an external mechanical process acts as an extension of your brain and thereby expands your consciousness. And it's not just your own mind, but a community mind feeding back on itself, wow. And oh, yeah, there is that dating service angle to it, and the site is loaded with hella fine babes with pictures, ow. Maybe the guys outnumber the girls by 2 to 1, or 3 to 1 even, but plenty of girls anyway. By day two, I was on Friendster all day long at work, and rushed home to play with Friendster late into the night. There's a bunch of different modes while you're logged on. You can edit your profile, your public facing page. You can check your home area for messages, new testimonials, new friend requests. You can go out looking for friends, either to add to your friends list, or add a testimonial to. You can learn all kinds of fascinating stuff about your friends you already know, like how old they are, what their favorite movies are. And, of course, the gallery. You can sort or filter by ages, gender, the gender they're seeking, marital status, distance in miles, and a couple of other things. Right away, I had a serious interest in trying the matchmaking end of it, searching for 30-35 year old single women within a 25 mile radius who were interested in a relationship with men. But there's other modes too. Like I could search for guys my age looking for girls, and would bump into dudes I know for real, and then I could send them a friend request, increasing both of our networks. You can also get very sublime with it; you can search for married people looking for swingers; also had some fine moments with some male friends sitting around the monintor leering at the 18-20 year old girls within a five mile radius, joking that we could buy them beer and drive them around in our cars. Honestly, I'm a middle age man, not very typical in my interests, kinda freaky, with lots of personal baggage. I don't have much interest in dating, or going out to get laid, just not my mode these days. All the same, I'm trolling Friendster- which is ostensibly a dating network- nearly 24/7 by the time my first weekend of Friendster rolls in. That first Friday morning, I've focused on several women on the site that seem appealing enough to attempt to socialize with, and send out some messages. No word back. That first weekend I literally locked myself in my room, sleepless and without eating. It was raining hard outside and I was hooked into this network. The stuff is hitting me like crack, fully addictive and I'm going psychotic. I must learn this thing, figure it out, understand its magic, fully understand all the people on it, more more more more more. I start messing around with my profile page constantly. All of a sudden my profile says "occupation: fiendster." For every prompt, I put in something fiendster. For favorite books, its 'Fiendster for Dummies.' Favorite TV Show: 'Fiendster, the Reality Show.' For interests, well, naturally, I put 'Fiendster.' Late into the weekend, sleepless and unfed, I had a headache. My eyes stung. My shoulders and neck burned. Back stiff. My feet and legs were always falling asleep. My butt ached from the chair. I kept on surfing. I start figuring out how the Gallery section search results are sorted. Basically, whomever's been logged on most recently sifts to the top, and those who have been inactive sift to the bottom. Further, people who have been editing their page, or uploading a new image, also sift to the top. I learn that at midnight, it updates everyone's 'last logged in' date, so that people who are still on are active within '24 hours' and people who are not get pushed back to '1 day.' Up all night long, I can see who's active on the site in the wee hours, and who isn't. I start deliberately logging on and off from midnight to 12:15 or so every night to put my own profile in the top of the search results, and uploading new pictures constantly, updating my profile by the hour. The first week I'm on, the site adds 15,000 users. Its a year old and I was user 83,000 or so. Do the math. This place is on fire and growing out of control. Started by Silicon Valley VC dorks before 9/11 and weakly launched to little fanfare in early 2002, it went largely unnoticed until it hit pockets of extremely wired young socialites- club kids, ravers, goths, burning man freaks and so on in early 2003. I figure out that the site had doubled in users in its past month. Wow, this is a scene. There is no revenue stream at all and the site is still in beta. The site itself has all kinds of problems. It lacks obvious features, its servers choke and sputter horribly, its down all the time. Its slow and ugly. The questions it asks are totally inane; almost everyone puts a variation of 'I don't watch TV' in the 'Favorite TV Shows' field. But in its simplicity, it finds its audience. I run into some vrml guru types who are on the network. Its been a dozen years since we learned about virtual reality, but there is a serious shortage of skilled folks to collaborate in an online community space at that level, and no thriving networks of such. Friendster is so gosh darn simple, all you can do to your page is edit these half dozen text fields and change your pictures around- custom html is filtered out for example- which creates a fairly level and egalitarian playing field. This is part of its magic. On the other hand, its easy to see the site's weaknesses and indeed, by the end of my first week I can already see into its inevitable demise, even as its still only in test mode. I write on my page that the great failure of Friendster is that you can't smell someone, see their eyes move, read their body language, hear their voice and how they interact in conversation, shake their hand or reach out to touch them. You can't feel their electricity, their aura, their fire. But I'm glued to the site. And start appreciating a social layer that's once removed from physical contact. Instead of going out to places where real people are, I'm playing with online profiles. I'd settled into this bizarre new mode encouraged by my Friendster addiction, an unlikely trinity of Narcissism, Sycophancy and Voyeurism. My body was already hit hard, weakened by the constant use of the site; I'd lost interest in eating or sleeping, only getting a couple of hours of shuteye a night for days on end. I was on a sleep deprivation high that reminded me of methamphetamines. On the narcissistic front, I was a changed man. Rereading my own profile page, and refilling out the forms over and over again, I was seeing myself from every possible angle. I was getting a new testimonial from someone every day, some kind of random glowing praise that warmly fuels your ego. I was rereading my growing collection of these constantly. I cycled through almost every flattering photo I had of myself on my page. I planned to buy and quickly acquired a cheap digital camera to take Friendster pictures with. I started shaving regularly to look good in the pictures. I was learning what angles I photographed better in. I took more photographs of myself in one week than had ever been taken in any week of my entire life. On the sycophancy tip, I was transformed into an ass-kisser. I'd find every good word to say about every remote friend on there, and glowingly typed it into their pages. I was emailing all my single friends to get them to join the network, lavishing praise on the whole affair. Strangely, all this attention on giving compliments was filling me with a glow. It was spilling over into my real life; I was giving out simple but deep compliments to all my friends and I was glowing watching them glowing. This was good for me and the people around me. On the voyeur tip, well, you're lurking through a network of tens of thousands of people. Finding a stray booby photo stashed away here and there. Seeing some really hot and appealing people regularly while I'm trolling through the site. I feel like a stalker. I am. I'm reading hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of profiles. They all start smearing together into this uberkid who's got a feather boa, has some crazy sunglasses, has been to Burning Man, is a DJ, and their favorite movies are Blade Runner and the Matrix. In public, there's clusters of real life people I'm around who are on Friendster. We have this amazing magical deep bond with each other that others simply don't understand. Our real time eye contact is magic. We give each other deeper hugs. We're on to something. We only talk about Friendster. Friends, co-workers and housemates who are opposed to Friendster start mocking us, speaking against us. Its such an us and them thing, you're on the network or you're not. There's a big party at my house, and a bunch of people from Friendster show up- I'd told them on Friendster. There's certainly a magic to the moment. It seems like the site is getting some unintended uses by the audience. Avatar characters, such as 'Burning Man' or 'Mr. T' start appearing. I start explaining this phenomenon with an electronic musical instrument metaphor: the Roland MC-303 was made in the 80s to play simple emulations of a bass guitar. Several years after its initial market failure, it was accidentally discovered that by taking some E, putting the thing through a huge sound system and making it do tortured filter sweeps, some people dance all night and find bliss. That was an unintended use of technology. Friendster feels like the early E days in the club scene. Its a contact high, I'm warm and glowing, flushed, fuzzy. My face hurts from smiling. Also, the big push in users reflects a real world no one mentions on Friendster- the US has invaded Bagdhad. I think people are looking to stick their head in the sand, this is a perfect little backwater to hide in. It is not real. This moment is like early 1964 after the Kennedy assassination. The US, in shock, is awakened by the cheery tunes of an English import, the Beatles. The Beatles had been number one in England for two years, that's big business, but it took the lull in the mainstream for them to get through. Similarly, the first Gulf War hit San Francisco's club scene- which, in early 1991 was all thrash funk rock bands- and killed it, which led to a vacuum that allowed the Rave culture to hit the Bay Area in late 1991. No marketing people at Friendster could have been responsible for these social conditions to occur. Their site had little interest in its entire first year. Datingwise, the place seems like a failure. None of the women I've attempted to contact, either by messages, or 'bookmarking' their page- which is sort of like a flirt- have written back. But, slowly, a few random women initiate messages with me and we strike up conversations. I compare notes with some other male friends and it seems to be working the same for them. I declare the place a Sadie Hawkins dance on my profile. I started staging photoshoots, several a day, taking the pictures myself with my new cheap digital camera. I start adopting various personas in visual and profile, caricaturing different elements of myself. Full blast schizophrenic narcissism. One moment I'm a hip hop DJ who likes graffiti; another minute I'm a dot com person into nanotech; another moment I'm a tweeked out artist guy, and so on. I learn that the version of me most popular with the ladies is 'Rocker Guy,' who wears faded jeans, has a vintage guitar and a dartboard, listens to Journey, Eddie Money and the Tubes, and, when confronted with the question 'what kind of people are you looking to meet?' replies simply 'Groupie Chicks.' Several strange and new ladies write rocker guy. DJ guy, who had a very nice photo that made him look like a bonafide DJ, got zero hits from the ladies, but my male friends who DJ'd all wrote to say how great the pics were. They were. I had concert lighting, decks with flight cases, a huge theatrical backdrop with graffiti panels, a killer angle of my hand on the 1200's pitch fader. My male friend who works in marketing for a major entertainment corporation in LA writes me 'best DJ pics on Friendster!' And the girls looked the other way. I think there's way too many DJs on Friendster. From there, in my third week, I evolve into a sort of reality TV show. I'm posting new sets of photos twice a day, and updating my profile text fields from scratch every morning and on the hour. I start developing an audience. I'm now up to dozens of friends, and knowing how to get sifted to the top of their gallery results, and having testimonials I'd written for others all over the site- my little image thumbnail has got to be everywhere. And its constantly changing. People are paying attention. Suddenly 20 out of every 25 emails i get are coming through Friendster, overloading my inbox, I have to disable the Friendster email alert feature. My very tolerant manager at work is joking about adding a client called 'Friendster' to our billing system. Or joking about blocking its IP in the office firewall. I've got simultaneous chats going on with a handful of ladies, none of whom I attempt to meet in real life. Lots of my male friends are checking in too. Its a buzzing hive of energy. I'm an addict. Not everything at the site is going well. They start deleting the avatar characters, which, by affinity, were terribly endearing and significant; you could hook up with people who shared, say, an interest in a certain famous person or show or event. They switch to a policy of only five pictures per account, after people were putting up dozens of pictures. A friend quits because her photo is deleted by the network for showing too much skin- and she's only showing her knees, much less than a bikini shot. The site sputters and pops and barely runs during peak times. People are complaining about the rumors of it switching to a pay site soon. I start complaining on my page about all the happy testimonials, egging people on to diss me, give me some bad testimonials. No one sends in anything negative. It seems so out of balance, way too PLUR, the tired Peace Love Unity and Rave thing. I had a small victory. It was frustrating that the only back-and-forth messaging I had with any women had been initiated by the women only, not me- like I said, it was strictly functioning as a Sadie Hawkins dance. I picked out a woman to contact, no matter what. After sending her five messages over three weeks she finally sends back a cryptic 'ewww, yer gross, buzz off' note in full-on gobbledeegook poetic prose I had to translate. I touched someone. I was thrilled! She told me to get lost! I felt like a stalker and was. I couldn't figure out what was weirder, my initial attempts to get any word back from her, or her very bizarre reply. I didn't write her back. Friendster goes on. At three weeks I'm up to 64 friends, 45,000 people in my network and over twenty testimonials. I'm popular there. I'm getting fan mail messages about my page updates. People are comparing it to the Truman Show. Saying I'm the best page on the site. I'm getting requests. One comes in from a lady Friendster to do a urinal shot. I take a great photo of a urinal, and post it with some nifty remarks about Marcel DuChamp. I was careful to not add any nudity, or excrement. The site has a policy that says not to post pictures of nudity, pornography, children, cartoons or copyright violations. The world comes crashing down around me. My urinal picture, which was getting all kinds of compliments, gets 'unapproved' by the borg at the heart of Friendster, with no further explanation. I didn't really mind this, I mean, I was uploading a different set of photos twice a day anyway and was about to take it down myself. But the thing that killed me, that was a deal breaker, was that they took away my ability to post images in realtime without admin review. I had this realtime reality show on a network with my friends and I lost my priviledges. I pathetically go nuts on my profile form, deleting everything and then ranting about not being able to upload images, reduced to a generic gray "?" icon and banished out of the popular gallery searches. About an hour and a half later I deleted my user from their system and sent a nasty note in the customer feedback form. I was free. The next morning, several lady friends from Friendster send email messages to the real me, finding my website and breaking through that extra layer removed that was Friendster. "Where's your page? I wanted to see your pictures this morning!" they wrote. All records of me were gone. No pictures, no testimonials, no friend links. My friends are complaining that they lost their favorite Friendster, that they lost connections in their network. One sends me an invite to join this amazing new network for dating and making friends called Friendster. Someone sends me an email with a rumour that they've added banner ads now. Another sends the url for the www.fiendster.com parody site, which has links to info about a new peer sharing language. I talk with various programmer friends about what we've learned. We see the site as something that's going to die, to be replaced by some peer to peer version with no centralized server to choke or censor the content. We talk about missing features it needed, like IM, better pages, streaming media, user-end filtering improvements. We see it as inevitable that more evolved generations of these tools will be built. And soon. Tons of coders are on Friendster. For now I'm glad to be off the network. But there will be more networks. I'm still in email contact with some of the women I met on there. We still have never met in real life.