Online networking service an attention getter

Hera Diani , The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Suddenly, it feels like being back in high school.

Everyone is competing in a full-on popularity contest: The numbers of friends you have, how cool your personal taste is, what your friends say about you.

Except that it is not high school, nor college, it is not even the real world.

Welcome to Friendster (www.friendster.com), an online networking service which has gripped the urban hipster scene in the last couple of months.

Rizal Iwan assumed it was a teen diversion when a friend invited him to join three months ago. Now, the 26-year-old copywriter admits to being addicted to the service.

He logs on almost daily to find his friends, their friends, and the friends of theirs. At last check, there were 76,197 people in his personal network.

"I spent hours on it now, barely working. It's like, OK, I got 50 first degree friends now, let's make it 70, and then let's make it 100. Like that," he said.

Most fun of all is getting a peek at people's profiles, bumping into old friends and finding out that some of his friends are actually connected.

"A friend from elementary school who I never had contact with since suddenly popped up and sent me a message. It's a nice surprise," he said.

To join Friendster, users fill out profiles with their relationship status (single, in a relationship, married, open married) and a list of their interests.

You get friends by sending e-mails inviting them to join. You can invite as many friends as you want through their approval. Then you get your friends to write testimonials about you, and vice versa.

You can browse your network, but only to three degrees removed from you.

That is still optional, as for some people, especially celebrities like singer Shanti, model Tracy Trinita and teenage heartthrob Nicholas Saputra, only their first degree friends are allowed access to their profiles.

Launched in March 2003, Friendster now has seven million people who are connected in some way.

"We are still technically in Beta mode or experimental mode because we have not launched our new product and features yet. We will be doing that soon, and at that time we will remove 'Beta' from the logo," Friendster's marketing and public relations executive Lisa Kopp wrote in an e-mail to The Jakarta Post.

Friendster, Inc., a privately held corporation, was founded in late 2002 by Jonathan Abrams, a Silicon Valley software engineer who worked at Netscape before striking out on his own.

The company is also backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Battery Ventures and individual investors.

Last year, three well-known Internet executives -- former Yahoo! chief executive Tim Koogle, former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel and Ram Shriram, a former board member of Amazon and Netscape and current board member of Google -- collectively invested more than US$1 million in the service. Koogle is also a member of Friendster's board of directors.

Abrams said he created Friendster to help people who did not feel comfortable meeting people through online classified ads.

"The whole point is to create a site where people are real. You're connected to people through your friends. It's far less creepy," said Abrams in an interview late last year in the Washington Post.

Less creepy? Not necessarily, as experienced by Yulia, 28, who joined Friendster to find a date.

"A guy asked to join my network and I approved it. But then he sent me these overly seductive messages, and even proposed to me. So, I kicked him out," said Yulia, who is connected to 17,466 people.

However, that does not stop her, like thousands of other Indonesians, from logging on for a daily Friendster fix.

According to Roby Muhamad, Indonesian researcher at Columbia University's School of Sociology, Friendster is popular because it fulfills the basic obsession of human beings -- to give and get attention.

"Friendster also becomes an ego-satisfying arena to see who's the most popular, which means who gets how many friends. This kind of activity, like other things on the Internet, is relatively easy to do so that it becomes an entertainment," he said by e-mail.

Roby and his colleagues are currently conducting research on "smallworld", studying how an individual takes advantage of his/her networks.

"Despite the wide networks and close connection, it doesn't mean that we can easily benefit from it. For instance, we would easily lend our friend money and vice versa. But not for our friend's friends. They're practically strangers."

It is a statement that rings true with Rizal, and also Zaki Ibrahim, 28, who said they just stick to people they know in expanding -- or rather, updating -- their networks.

"It's just something in the past, you know, inviting strangers on the Internet. I still believe in the real process of getting introduced to someone in the real world," said Zaki, an advertising agency employee who has 81,837 friendsters.

He is now considering finding people of certain expertise through Friendster in case the company he works for needs it.

As Roby mentioned, many people have treated Friendster as a giant parlor game to see who is connected to the most people.

Nita Yuanita, 28, said her friends got upset if people in their network have more friends.

"Many beg their friends to write testimonials for them, so that their girlfriends/boyfriends and everybody will think of them as cool and popular," said the lecturer at Bandung's Institute of Technology, with 73,466 friendsters.

Recently, news spread that the site would start charging a subscription fee, a rumor Abrams refused to answer in the Washington Post.

Would people be willing to pay? "Not a chance," Rizal said, a view echoed by Nita and Zaki.

Then, people will perhaps look for other ways to "connect" with others. Several websites have emerged with similar ideas, such as Tribe, Spoke, VisiblePath, ZeroDegrees, Ryze or iCan.

So, get connected, to whatever degree it actually counts for.