Online networking service an attention getter

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.