Attack of the Clones

I've been talking to a friend of mine at Salon.com about the whole Friendster phenomena for months. She's been planning to write something about it for a while. By this point there have been tons of articles and blog posts about what Friendster is and why it's so cool, so of course now we're onto the backlash stage. She finally got approval from her editors to write something and her story is up. Co-incidentally, in the course of a couple days, the Village Voice, Salon, and the SF Weekly have all published very similar articles about fakesters and Friendster's reaction to them. It's funny to see how stuff like this goes in cycles, and the same ideas come from multiple places at once.

I've been on Friendster since the middle of March. My userid is around 50,000. Now they're up to over 1.6 million. It's been growing at an insane rate. Within my group of friends I've seen some interesting patterns of usage. Some people politely sign up and maybe even put up a photo and a simple profile but then they hardly use it. Others ignore the first or second invite and think you're a loser for even suggesting that they would want to sign up for something so dorky, but then somehow after 5 friends all invite them they get the idea that it isn't just for nerds or spam magnets. Then they sign up and become completely addicted. One of my friends finally went cold-turkey and took down his profile after logging in and tweaking his profile multiple times a day. There's a well written story (by someone I don't know) that follows the arc of a Friendster addict beautifully.

Meanwhile Jonathan Abrams et al, are trying to monetize eyeballs, but unfortunately they don't seem to have much of a clue about fostering communities. I wasn't a big fan of the fakesters on Friendster, but seeing this really corporate, dull clamp-down on what Friendster's users are doing, I find myself rooting for the fakesters. You can tell that Abrams doesn't get what he's got. It's almost as stupid as the RIAA discovering that a bunch of music-fans/customers are really happy because they are able to find interesting music on P2P networks and then suing them. The only salient point that they see is that people are "stealing" music, while missing the features of the P2P networks that people would gladly pay for if they were done right. Apple at least understood that you should give the customers what they want. If it is cheap enough and instant enough the "free" version which involves stealing becomes less interesting. Of course until they manage to have the same breadth of choice as the P2P networks I don't find it that exciting, but that's another post.

I first experienced online communities in 1986 while interning at IBM. I was able to read and post on their internal forums. At the time there were some uber-geeks that were allowed to access Usenet, but the forums that I was on weren't linked to the outside world. Even at such a large staid corporation, I could see what I would latter come to know as archetypal patterns of mailing lists/Usenet newsgroups/forums/bulletin boards etc. Excessive cross-posting, arguments about the topicality of posts, flame wars, experts, newbies, FAQs - none of that is new. While in college I started and ran a couple of mailing lists: one devoted to DJing and another about "post-modern culture" and art. I've played around with IRC, MUDs, chat rooms, IM etc. More recently I've played around with Nerve, Match.com, eMode, and Alt.com. And of course now you're reading this on a blog which has the potential for feedback and conversation although it is primarily a unidirectional system. At some level all of these are media for meeting other people and talking about shared interests. Each medium has some obvious big differences and not so obvious subtle differences.

In any system there are people that will try to destroy it by posting troll messages, spamming, or otherwise shaking things up in an anti-social manner. Even early in the history of Usenet when you had to work at a big high-tech company or go to a geeky college in order to have access, there were people that had the online equivalent of Tourette's syndrome. In order to have a viable community there have to be rules and ways of enforcing them, otherwise the system falls apart.

Part of Slashdot's success is its implementation of moderating. By giving its users the ability to self-police and rate posts, they've substantially increased the signal to noise ratio of the discussions. Kuro5hin uses a similar but different rating/content system and achieves impressive results. Craig's list is legendary for its sense of community, even though it doesn't really offer much in the way of dialog. What it does do right is let the community filter and moderate the posts, while it intentionally doesn't encourage replies and discussion threads. Each of these systems is slightly different in how it handles anonymity, replies, and ratings, but these are all features that have to be addressed in a consistent way for a system to hang together.

Abrams started Friendster as an online dating service, but he's really missing the point. Friendster is already a virtual community. It has some good features that make it exciting, such as the ability to post more than one picture of yourself, show how you're connected to your friends and acquaintances, and write testimonials about each other. This is the part that was well done that caused the system to grow exponentially. Once people have been on for a while they look around for something else to do besides collect other Friendsters. The fakesters are a reaction to the fact that other features of Friendster, such as the bulletin board system are really broken and lacking. People are looking for a creative outlet to communicate to others on the system. Every viable online community has a decent communications medium. On Friendster the bulletin board system seems to be an after-thought.

When I first joined, Friendster's one bulletin board was open to anyone in your 4-degree network, now it's cut down to your immediate friends. Both systems are broken. When it was open to zillions of people the signal to noise was near zero, and there was no way to carry on an effective thread of a conversation. Now that it is only open to your immediate friends there is no conversation because if person A posts and person B replies the audiences for the posts are different. The first post may only be seen by person A's friends and the second only by B's. Presumably A and B are friends and may have several mutual friends, but it's next to impossible avoid forking the conversation threads. Even if you accept that it is primarily there to post announcements it is too limited. If I wanted to invite people to a party I should be able to at least add the second degree of friends to the intended recipients. There is no provision for this.

Friendster profiles have fields for books, music, movies, tv, and general interests. It even automatically tries to link your entries to a search for people with similar interests in your extended network. This seems like a natural jumping off point for a topical bulletin board system hosted by Friendster. Instead I'm stuck with one option - I can email some random person with a dorky message saying "Gee, I see that you like collecting Pez dispensers too, wanna be my Friendster?" A mailing list or bulletin board can be like an ongoing virtual party. It can be an interesting way to meet new people. If I choose to be semi-public by posting to a board, I expect that others would be able to contact me. In fact I'd be happy if the boards were open to anyone on Friendster that wanted to join that topic. Filtering by who is in my little clique of friends is antithetical to the supposed point of the whole system which is to meet new people. What is probably necessary is some sort of moderation system, preferably one that involves the users, not the employees of Friendster. The backlash against the clamp-down on the fakesters is just an example of the fact that the users of Friendster don't want babysitters to sanitize the experience for our protection - for that, there's AOL.

Comments

[Fakester Webmaster]

Thanks for the article. The Fakester Revolution now has a new website at:
fakesters.netfirms.com

we posted this article on it.

Long Live the Revolution!

[David]

hi,

we are starting the production of a documentary on friendster and it's higher implications and philosophical conflicts.

please contact us/ add us as your friendster : friendsterdoc@yahoo.com

we need people to be featured and/or to help us in research and development

be part of an exciting project!!