So a coworker of mine was showing me Friendster.com, a website where apparently people put up an elaborate profile of themselves for the purpose of meeting other people.
What are people’s thoughts on these kinds of sites?
A friend signed me up for it a couple years ago, and I wound up ignoring it completely.
A few months ago, the women in the radical art collective I helped found put themselves on Friendster and invited me in. Since then we’ve been using it to stay in touch with each other, although I haven’t expanded my acquaintance to any of the other people in the extended network. I guess the system is set up so you can meet the friends of your friends, etc., but I haven’t felt any inclination to expand to the second or third circles, since I’m happy with the friends I have already.
I find it quite handy as I’ve lived in three different countries over the last ten years and have met people of yet more nationalities who’ve moved all over the place. So it’s handy to have a place where so I don’t completely lose touch with everyone as sometimes I really can’t keep up with the e-mail. Their profiles can show me what they’re up to. Also, for the ones I am actually in touch with it’s nice to see pictures and profiles of friends and even lovers who come up in conversations that I haven’t met yet.
The only thing that slightly annoys me is that when Friendster got succesful there was a whole boom of similar sites that were better/more cool/had more features or whatnot and friends would be on all different sites. Can’t be bothered with the effort of multiple profiles so it’s Friendster for me and that’s it.
Have snooped around my friends’ friends as well as random people on the site but haven’t met anyway new yet but that’s okay by me. All in all, a fun diversion but not crucial to life or friendship either.
Semi-obligatory link to the SDMB MySpace group.
MySpace and Facebook and good for finding old classmates and such. Eh, I like it.
I’ve used those sites to keep/get back in touch with people from high school or other little parts of life.
Once Friendster got trounced by MySpace, they reacted by re-over-building the site into this unusable monstrosity. MySpace is okay, as long as the user you’re looking at hasn’t embedded three mp3s and two WMVs and a background that blinks (who lets these @#$%ing people use HTML, anyhow?!)
There’s also orkut (by Google) and hi5, but neither of those really look like they’re going anywhere. Dodgeball was along the same lines, but it would tie into your cell phone, so if you were a bit bored at the bar, you could text Dodgeball with your location, and if any of your friends were nearby, it’d text them, telling you where you were.
As with LiveJournal or just about anything on the internet, it’s what you make it. You can put your life story on the site, or just use it as a bookmark to find other people’s e-mail addresses.
A friend asked me to sign up with friendster a few years ago. I completely ignored it, then a very good friend of mine from high school that I hadn’t talked to in a couple of years contacted me on it. I was then informed that myspace is better and so signed up for that. It’s been a good deal as I’ve been able to get in touch with people from high school and college I hadn’t talked to in a few years and see what they were up to.
I think myspace is totally gay.
See now that’s another thing. I’ve been to Classmates.com and I went to my 5 and 10 year reunions, but for the most part, why do I want to keep in touch with people from past lives? Not that I want to exclude anyone, but there reaches a point where friendships 300 miles away and 15 years ago become irrelevant. If a high school buddy moved next door to me, then I might think about rekindling that relationship.
I think that’s one of the problems with these web sites is that they almost serve as a life support system for relationships that should have ended naturally years ago.
A couple of people I work with who I know pretty well are signed up on Friendster. Now would I try to connect with them via Friendster? If I want to do something with them, I know where they sit. I have their email and phone numbers.
It almost seems like people just collect “Friends” on these sites so they have a bunch of virtual pen pals or something. One girl I know has like 90 and she’s fairly unpleasent IRL.
I think there’s a lot to that, actually. However, I personally feel that in an ideal world I would never let a friendship die just because someone moves away. I know that in the real world you cannot possibly keep up with all the correspondence etc so friendships fizzle out. So if something lets me stay in touch, albeit in a small way, with minimal effort then I think that is better than nothing. You’re right that I’m still in touch with the people that really matter to me anyway, even before Friendster or e-mail, so I see the Friendster site more as a bonus.
What I’ve found is that with a lot of those long distance relationships, eventually they just become irrelevant. Not because of distance but because your lives just go in separate directions.
Sure, they can be mostly irrelevant. But so is MPSIMS and we keep coming back for more!!
Maybe irrelevant isn’t the right word. You know how it’s like you have some friends and you can go years without seeing each other but you pick up right where you left off when you do? Then you have some who you see after a few years, exchange pleasentries and it’s basically like “ok…nice talk…see you in another 5 years.”
Anyhow, it seems like part of the point of Friendster sites is to connect with other people with similar interests. It seems to me that you would just be better off joining offline groups that do that. IOW, you like biking, join a bike club. You like baseball, join a baseball league.
Thus far, the only thing my Friendster account as been good for is keeping me supplied with opportunities to view naked, spelling-impaired sluts on their webcams.
Hmm, it seems as though I haven’t spent nearly enough time on Friendster…
MySpace, at least on my end, resulted in a daily flood of messages from guys who obviously did not read my profile. Also, their grasp of the English language was less than subpar.
I have, however, made several good (local) friends through it, and my boyfriend and I originally met on Myspace with the intent of just being friends (as we both attend the same university). As long as you’re careful, I think it’s a great way to meet new people for friendship/dating/networking.
He’s refering to the barage of spam emails you get once you sign up.