raleighnet.org

On a whim this morning, I decided to sign up with Friendster. I saw some people talking about it earlier in the month, and it was mostly in a negative light as I recall. It turned me off to it, but they’ve been kicking up the publicity machine lately, and they managed to convince me that it may not be what I thought and that it may be worth a look.

For those that don’t know, it’s a six degrees of separation kind of thing where you identify your friends in the system, and they identify their friends etc until you have thousands of potential contact nodes in the network of people.

The initial vibe I got was that they were positioning it as a dating service. It doesn’t seem very well suited to that use though. Things I think you’d want to know about a potential mate aren’t there, searching for somebody is either highly limited or kludgy as hell. Plus, you can only search within your network of contacts and given that some dating deal breakers may be specific and hard to fill, I’m not sure I see the value of severely restricting your sample.

However, the idea of inviting somebody to be your friend is very appealing, and I can see where if done right, they could get a high level of viral pass around where one person get on and that person brings on all their real life friends, who do the same, who do the same etc. until you have quite the customer base.

It’s free for now. I don’t know quite what I think about it yet. It’s cool to see how even just two friends can explode out into a network of thousands of possible contacts. We’ll see how it does with maybe finding a SCUBA buddy for me this summer (unless you dear reader would like to be my SCUBA buddy).

Anyway, if you want to try it and want me to invite you to be my friend, drop me a comment (or an e-mail if you know one of mine), and I’ll hook you up.