The (Re)Start of a Trend

The project starts tomorrow. The project is this: I am going to try to get my friends to use Friendster again. I am going to try to set a trend.

Friendster: it's the granddaddy of the social networking sites. Once upon a time, a ton of people used it. Now, apparently, it's popular in Asia, but at least among people I know, no one uses it. It's a site that is very quiet, full of profiles that haven't been updated in years. And it is sad. Why? I'm not sure. I mean, am I feeling empathy for a Web site? A virtual world? Why? Such seems ludicrous. Perhaps, I feel for the people behind the site, the people who put all that work into creating it and then who see so few appreciate it.

Once upon a time, there were Friendster dates (I never managed to get one, but I knew at least one guy who went on several). There were Friendster parties--print out your Friendster profile and that's your invitation to enter, or find a posting for a party on the board and go. I did meet one person at a party who had shown up based on such an invitation.

Then, people started using MySpace. Eventually, amid the quiet suburbia that Friendster had become, full of empty houses, I made my transition too. One theory is that MySpace took off because Friendster took too long to load, since it took so long to calculate how you were connected to other people (one of my favorite features on Friendster, now discontinued). I'd never had much trouble with Friendster. I had more such problems with MySpace, where each person could personalize his or her page. In that sense, returning to Friendster for a visit many months later, I found the site to be a bit on the drab site--but it loaded so much more quickly. And those personalized My Space pages were, admittedly, sometimes kind of annoying.

Now, it seems that Facebook is the cool site. Why the migration? Some theories: the long load time for MySpace or the amount of spam (first e-mails and then, when My Space solved that problem, "friends" trying to add you in order to get you to come to their mortgage or porn site). But I think that one major reason is likely that Facebook allows people to stay in touch with ONLY the people they already know. This cuts down on the spam and the unwanted e-mails. But it also cuts out one of the things I even bother with social networking sites for--meeting new people. If I can't just look at profiles and see what people are into and come across those who seem like they might make good friends or good virtual friends, why bother with the networking site? I suppose, it's an easy way to update everyone you already know about your life without having to e-mail everyone personally. But that too smacks of a bit of laziness to me. I'd rather get a personal letter. If I don't rate high enough for that, why bother updating me? And if others don't rate high enough for me to do that, why am I updating them on my life? That MySpace and Friendster now offer you the opportunity to keep private profiles have in effect made them all that much more similar to Facebook in this way. The social network is not the interesting place it used to be to surf.

Given the complaints noted above, that I of all people would set out to make Friendster the site to use again perhaps is a little odd. I don't particular like social networking sites. I barely use them, mostly maintaining a presence on them so that, in the rare cases where I do need them, I can put them to use. They are handy in terms of getting in touch with some people I might not have as many dealings with. And it remains to be seen, but I suspect they might be of use when looking for a job (the whole point of LinkedIn). And it might have other uses to.

What then do I hope to achieve in helping to get Freindster up and running again with active users? I suppose part of me just wants to help make the original purveyors of social networking reap a few rewards from their invention. Part of me also wants to see a site I actually prefer to Facebook being used. But I think the largest part of me--and this is the thing I think is likely to be confirmed--wants to see just how inconsequential I am, how beside the point. I don't set trends. If anything, I follow them, and when I don't, as often happens, I simply stand alone. Stubborn in my usage of Friendster, I stood alone for a year after my friends stopped using it, resorting to MySpace one lonely week off work one winter. And ever stubborn, I continue in my preference as Facebook takes on higher and higher usage rates. Am I the loner I suspect I am--the kind of guy who can only get or maintain friendships by following them wherever they happen to go? Let's see. (Or rather, let me see, since I suspect this blog will be followed by only one person also--namely, me.)