friendster

Friendster is an internet social network service. The Friendster site was founded in Mountain View, California by Jonathan Abrams in 2002 and is privately owned. Friendster is based on the Circle of Friends technique for networking individuals in virtual communities and demonstrates the small world phenomenon.

Friendster was considered the top online social network service until around April 2004 when it was overtaken by MySpace in terms of page views, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. [1] Friendster has also received competition from all-in-one sites such as Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo! 360 and Facebook.

Other services have played on Friendster's "ster" brand in various niche online communities. Petster for example, is a site that creates a social network for people's pets. Ridester is a site that creates a travel community where people can share the costs of road trips.

Usage

Generally speaking, the members of Friendster's service are young adults in Europe, North America, and Asia aged about 21 to 30. However, even that cannot be accurately defined as there are also many other users within other regions and age groups. The largest group of users of Friendster in a region may not have the same characteristics as that from other regions, as evidenced in the larger membership of teenagers than young adults in South East Asia especially in countries like India, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Recently, Friendster has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity with the English-speaking LGBT community.

Fakester

A fakester is a type of account profile found at Friendster. Fakesters are often created as a form of online fan club for bands, movies, celebrities, television book characters, and pets as well as activist groups. The administrators at Friendster first tried to discourage this practice, and later outright deleted 200,000+ accounts - many of which were pet accounts. Friendster was originally intended as a pure social experiment to see exactly who was connected to whom. Rather than growing and adapting to the desires of the members, Friendster held strongly to that original vision and wanted only the true social network to be represented. As social networking became more popular the value of a fakester like vehicle became apparent even to Friendster administrators. Friendster changed their position and created official Fakesters to correspond with television and movie characters.

By this time, it was too late. Friendster lost most of its momentum. While fakesters exist on sites like MySpace and Facebook these sites also have features called groups that users can join to serve the same function of the fakester.

External links

• Friendster Official Website
• Academic articles on Friendster by Danah Boyd
• Friendster Wins Patent, Red Herring
• "Attack of the Smartasses": an article in SF Weekly about the Fakester Revolution, the user-based protest against Friendster