The Plan

I have one month to make Friendster popular again among my peer set. How am I going to do it? And what constitutes popularity? Both great questions and both questions I don't have ready answers for. But here's what I know of the plan so far, what I can sketch out:

• E-mail former Friendster friends to say hello and get them using the site again
• E-mail other friends I know who are currently on Friendster but who I'm not friends with me
• E-mail a few people I know who aren't on Friendster

These are what one would expect from someone looking to make it on a social network. Are others doing something different, something more interesting? Are there keys to being popular, in a virtual way, that I'm not taking advantage of?

Another thing to do would be to update my profile. Problem: Yeah, so I haven't updated my profile in probably five years. But nothing much has changed. So . . . Guess that's staying the same.

Today, I e-mailed three Friendster friends (I'm down to twenty-eight, after a high of around thirty-five). On MySpace I'm at around thirty friends, around twenty-three on Facebook. Writing my messages to these friends, I'm struck by, well, wordlessness. I mean, what exactly am I to use these sites for? Anyway, I attempt a message. Last login for many of these folks is sometime in 2004 or 2005. Sad. I also added one new friend--we'll see if she accepts (wasn't able to message her because she has messaging off). The job has begun.