10:10 p.m. - 2004-01-12
friendster says that a love is never true
i am the greatest that there is in terms of checking my friendsters to see if anyone has updated their pictures. no updates of this sort escape my attention for long, not even if they are buried at the bottom end of my friendsters, the elite early arrivals who came and made their mark on the friendster network long before the fad took hold among hipsters - and yet still update (some of them) from time to time, perhaps with new pictures.
the spread of friendster is an interesting sociological phenomenon... on the surface it seems as if it should be essentially viral, spreading from person to person with the arrival of friendster invitations. and essentially this is correct, however, susceptibility to the virus is only partially predictable, and its word-of-mouth spread is contained by the fact that it is far too dorky to bring up just anywhere. any water cooler in the country will tolerate "hey, have you guys heard about that weird new show on cbs?", and a fad haircut travels through word of eye, far less selective. but friendster you tell of only to those who are a) people you want to be your friendsters, and b) people who you think will not be confused/dorked off by the whole concept. of this population of people you tell of friendster, it is reasonable to assume that only some subset will actually sign up and connect to you (and only some subset of that group will ever have anybody but you as friendsters, but that's another tangent). what boundaries define this subset are a particular mystery, but i wonder if perhaps after all its booming, friendster may hit a plateau of participation, with the vast majority of wired hipsters who see any point in such a thing being already in on the joke. that may have already happened. it is hard to tell without the numbers in front of one. and the factors are hard to isolate; for example, the lousiness of friendster's servers undoubtedly turns many people off from it or interrupts many chances to expose someone to it. also, unlike many other viral crazes, friendster has never gotten the kind of media exposure that would come from, say, a medium-sized ad campaign. even lycos.com, pitiful poor relation of the good search engines, has those stupid stupid commercials with the dog. but i bet more people use google. so who knows?
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