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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
A booming online service for connecting people takes up arms against a sea of "fakesters" who'd rather role-play than network.
Aug 14, 2003 | For a gigantic deep sea creature only seen by humans when it's dead or dying, the Giant Squid has a lot friends on Friendster. Last Friday, before his account was suspended, Giant Squid had 335 "friendsters."
This particular giant squid is one of several specimens of his rare and storied species found on the site. He lists his favorite music as the "wailing of damned souls" and his favorite movie as "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." Among the squid's interests: "capsizing ships, eating human flesh, destroying corporate culture and mocking Jon Abrams."
Since launching the beta version of the community site in March 2003, Jonathan Abrams, 33, founder and CEO of Friendster, has built a network of 1.5 million friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends.
Like playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" with your own universe of pals, acquaintances and confidantes, Friendster brings networks that already exist in the real world to the Web. Members post profiles of themselves and then ping their friends on the system to link profiles. Friends invite each other to join, which is one reason the site has grown so fast, infecting social groups and hopscotching between them, bringing new cliques on board.
Friendster quickly entered into a certain urbane vernacular -- "are you on Friendster?" -- and inspired no fewer than four online parodies, plus an infographic in the Onion. But as the site, which is currently free to use, has grown, some friendsters have taken it in directions the founder doesn't like.
Giant Squid is not alone: Among the "Fakesters" who've signed up for Friendster are Jackalope, God, Beer, Drunk Squirrel, Hippie Jesus, Malcolm X and more than a dozen Homer Simpsons. Just like regular users, they post their photos, blab on bulletin boards and collect friends like so many baseball cards. Some, staying in character, even write gushing testimonials about their friends: What higher endorsement could there be than a few complimentary words from Homer himself? "Better than a cold can of Duff beer ... "
But while it may be amusing to invite God himself into your pool of friends and get back the message, "God is now your friend," the founder of the site says that such chicanery only distorts his system.
"Fake profiles really defeats the whole point of Friendster," says entrepreneur Abrams, interviewed by cellphone as he waited to catch a plane in Los Angeles. "Some people find it amusing, but some find it annoying. And it doesn't really serve a legitimate purpose. The whole point of Friendster is to see how you're connected to people through your friends," he says.
When hundreds, sometimes even thousands of people link themselves to a popular fakester, it links up groups who have no association with each other but their mutual friendship with God or Giant Squid. While this promiscuous linking madly expands peoples' networks, it defeats what Abrams sees as the point of the site he's created: "If people are randomly connecting to these fake profiles, I guess it's funny, but it's not really that useful. We're hiring some customer support people, and we're going to get rid of all that stuff," he says.
But some of Friendster's members maintain that that site is so popular because of the creative and unexpected ways its early inhabitants used it. They charge that squelching all that ambient zaniness will just kill what's great about it.
"The bigger your network is, the more people you can meet. The whole point is that you want more people in your network," says Michelle Cohen, a Web producer for iVillage, who counts Drunk Squirrel among her friendsters. "It's not defeating the purpose, it's just creating more opportunity for networking and organic community-building. In a way, I think that the people have spoken deciding what the purpose is. That's why there are so many people on it."
