Posted by : meshy on Nov 05, 2003 - 05:14 PM WebTechnology

Imagine you have 246,844 friends in cyberspace - only 18 of whom you actually know. It's possible with Friendster.com, the free online social pyramid that burst on the urban hipster scene eight months ago and has amassed 2 million registered users.
By signing up and filling out a personal profile, users can exchange messages about their favorite books, dredge up forgotten college buddies and even make a love connection or two.

Some early users say they have already moved on, turned off by the site's popularity. And copycat pages and anti-Friendster sites have popped up to feed on the interest. Whether they signal a dying fad or a sustained phenomenon, the site's developer is too frenzied to deal with most press inquiries.

One source of endurance could come from the odd ``collecting'' aspect of friendster.com. Many fans obsessively gather friends like baseball cards or MP3 files. In that sense, it's like the music file-sharing Web site it was named after, Napster - except with people.

You first invite your friends to join, then they bring in their friends and you can ask those friends to be your friends.

``We call it the new online crack,'' said Carrie White, a 28-year-old Atlanta electronica/house music promoter, who has collected 167 first-link friends that stretch to an absurd 950,000 people once you move out four degrees of separation. ``Some friends are so addicted that when they come over, they want to use my computer immediately to check their Friendster account.''

On common ground

Besides promoting parties on the bulletin board, she checks out friends' bios and photos, which range from arty to silly. Her friend Carol's main photo is a close-up of her cleavage while Johnny's interests include ``spanking bad girls'' and ``satanic yoga.''

``You can find how interesting or boring your friends are, too,'' she said. And after she listed ``Cecil B. Demented'' as a favorite film, an actor from the John Waters movie within her sphere of ``friends'' contacted her by e-mail. ``He was just really excited that I listed his movie,'' she said.

The profile page includes a spot for photos, a biography with categories such as ``favorite movies'' and ``who I want to meet'' and an area where friends can offer testimonials about you (``Abby is a fine young lady who happens to enjoy enraged dairy products and baskets of kittens,'' Carl wrote about one Friendster.)

Angela Roberts, a 33-year-old advertising technology developer in Decatur, Ga. who has 81 first-link Friendster friends, keeps tabs on people she might have drifted away from, especially from her ``rave'' party days in the 1990s. ``Makes me feel old,'' she said. (Now she has knitting buddies, too).

Some Friendsters are actually translating the online communal spirit into face-to-face Friendster parties.

Earlier this month at the trendy new Mark nightclub in Atlanta, a Friendster gathering drew nearly 800 people via word of mouth alone.




``I didn't spend a penny on advertising,'' said Pablo Henderson, the manager of the Mark, called Karma in a previous incarnation. ``And even with an open bar for two hours, we did very very well. Word spread like wildfire.''

Psyched for cyberspace

The crowd was hip and diverse: ``Gay, straight, punk, hip-hop, you name it.'' He first heard about Friendster in the spring among the Britpop underground crowd, followed by the bar industry, the artists and musicians.

While some are merely seeking community, others seek dates that are hopefully less creepy if they are at least linked to someone you know. That was the case with Kirk Leitch, a 24-year-old Atlanta freelance designer. Over the summer, a friend named Chris had met 22-year-old Lindsey Campbell via Friendster and said the pair should talk so Leitch checked out her profile, thought she looked cute and began instant messaging her.

A couple of weeks later, Campbell was house-sitting near his home and invited him over. Sparks flew and they've been dating ever since. ``Chris broke the ice for me,'' Leitch said. ``Without Friendster, those two would have never met and I would never have talked to her.'' In the ``who I want to meet'' category on Friendster, he writes: ``Sorry, I've already met her and she's ten million times better than you.''

Cyber love, however, still eludes Sean Daniels, director of Atlanta theater Dad's Garage. He's gotten e-mails from three women interested in meeting him. He invited them to his theater and had his staff in the front lobby scope them out. ``The feedback was not good,'' he said. ``Each time, I hid in the back.''

The Friendster concept has spawned dozens of copycats, from tickle.com to buddybridge.com to tribe.net. In Atlanta, 42-year-old Larry Peck has launched clickparty.com as yet another alternative.

Free or fee?

``Friendster is overblown,'' Peck said. ``They've got too much data on it. The site is too slow. We are taking the anonymity out of it and not restricting people within their own network. You can see anyone's pals.''

But given the low cost of entry - which is zero dollars - it will be difficult for many of these other sites to gain traction for the same reason eBay is able to dominate the auction scene.

The phenomenon has overwhelmed its Sunnyvale, Calif.-based founder Jonathan Abrams, who still hasn't figured out how to profit from the heavy Web traffic but venture capitalists are swarming. His only response for comment was this e-mail: ``Sorry, we are swamped, and I have no marketing or PR or anyone to assist me yet.''

Abrams did tell CNN last month that the site will start charging for some services at some point: ``Most of the site will remain free, but if you want to contact someone you don't know, that would require a small fee.''

Nate Elliot, an associate Internet analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, said it's always difficult to persuade consumers used to a free service to switch to a paid one. ``If they start charging, they'd be competing with the dating services out there and so far, Friendster seems to be more about social networking than dating,'' Elliot said.

There's also the inevitable backlash. Several spoof Web sites mock Friendster such as fiendster.com and hatester.org, which says, ``feel free to cultivate your hatred'' and asks for ``put downs'' instead of testimonials. And on Friendster itself, a few ``fakesters'' pop up pretending to be celebrities. Sean Daniels of Dad's Garage is proud to have ``Burt Reynolds'' as a ``friend.'' (Friendster said it will take down fake friends if flagged.)

Already for some, the initial rush of Friendster has already worn off. Casey Dryden, who works at Turner Studios and Dad's Garage, said he was on Friendster every day over the summer, even getting his mom to sign up. Now he has 87 first-link friends and only checks the site once a week. ``In some ways, it's not trendy anymore,'' he said. ``Too mainstream.''

(The Cox web site is at http://www.coxnews.com )