Bluejake

I've been on Friendster for a few months now, and yesterday I noticed that I hit a watershed mark: 50 friends. This prestigious accomplishment caused me to reflect on the network for a few minutes, and I jotted down these ideas:

1. Friendster is a scale-free network: most people have only a small number of friends, but a very small percentage of power users have hundreds of friends. These people form hubs through which most of the other people are connected. This explains how I am connected to approximately 150,000 people through Friendster when all but three of my friends are basically social-pariahs.

2. As on other scale-free networks, including the web, Friendster shows evidence of a "rich-get-richer" feedback loop, where popular people become exponentially more linked and connected than unpopular people. I've noticed that as I went from 10 to 20 to 30 friends, the rate of people finding me has accelerated, and I've gained more friends each week than the week before. However, this effect is constrained, since eventually I will exhaust the number of people I am actually friends or acquiantances with, and unlike some people I know, I'm not approving strangers or people I've just met on the network.

3. On Friendster, as in life, the quality of your friends is more important than the quantity. How can you measure the quality of your friends? You can choose any qualifiers you want- I weigh quality like so: 50% on looks, 25% on famousness, and 10% on intelligence, 10% on creativity, and 5% on wealth. Based on this, my 50 friends are practically worthless! That is, having like one Bill Clinton in your network is probably worth more than all the nobodies, mental-cases, hipsters, and failed artists that I know.

4. Testimonials are the wackest thing in the entire world. There is so much ass-kissing and "Jimmy is the greatest guy in the world- I luv you boy!" on there that I automatically dismiss anyone that has more than 5 testimonials as being hopelessly uncool. Also uncool: creating a culture where you and all your friends write testimonials for each other. It reminds me of publicists who try to create a buzz for a particularly stupid book or film. So next time you write a testimonial, don't, or at least be honest: cruelly and artfully honest. Like "I wouldn't trust Jake any further than I could throw him, but since he's my only friend, what can I do?"

5. Friendster is good for only three things: picking up insane people for dates that will never work out, assuaging your feelings of horrible unpopularity by amassing an expanding and ever growing network of "friends", and using the bulletin board function to tell people about parties and puppies for sale. Oh, and of course, for torturing people you know.

6. I posted this point as a response to Jen's Gothamist article on Friendster: "I just wish there was a way to specify that you are enemies with someone- it would make the whole social structure a lot more interesting and accurate. Right now we just have a system built on associations, whereas we all know the real world is built on associations and enmities. Does anyone have any idea of how this functionality could be built into the system? I think it would be enough to have another box under each user labelled "enemies", and unlike friends, you wouldn't have to approve someone for them to become your enemy- it could be a one-sided thing."

7. Have you ever noticed that Friendster sorts your friends by their Friendster ID number? For instance, I'm Friendster ID #136001. Friendster IDs are given out in order, and your friends with higher numbers (more recent sign-ups) are listed first in the box. I predict that low numbers will soon become a status symbol- like "I'm #1005, yo!". And you'll see low friendster ID number on t-shirts and iced-down gold medallions and such. I've done some research and I can't find any users with numbers lower than 101, which seems to be assigned to Jonathan Abrams, the guy who started the service.

Ideas