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. Every user creates an online identity by filling out a questionnaire profile and uploading a user picture, and then defines a gallery of friends, and the service then integrates these galleries, allowing a user to search through a list of their friends, their friends' friends, and so on. The premise is that in this way, one can interact with and meet people who are always a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and not a random, unknown person (such as may be found on instant messaging or IRC). It is difficult to verify the number of members (or active members) of Friendster. Currently, the service's home page claims more than 19 million "profiles, photos, and blogs", and an info page states that there are "more than 20 million members". In the press, however, an often cited figure is approximately 2 million. If user ID numbers are assigned consecutively, there have been at least 21,351,560 (though it is unclear what proportion of unique ID numbers represent unique active users).

Related Topics:
Social network service - Mountain View, California - Jonathan Abrams - Online identity - Questionnaire - User picture - Random - Instant messaging - IRC

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Friendster is based on the Circle of Friends technique for networking individuals in virtual communities and demonstrates the small world phenomenon.

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Of course, as with any form of social network online, there are also members who are not who they claim to be. A significant number of people have created new profiles for bands, movie, television and book characters and activist groups as a form of online fan club. These accounts are often referred to as fakesters. While the administrators of the site at first tried to discourage the practice, as the service became more popular, official fakesters were created by the Friendster staff to correspond with television and movie characters.

Related Topics:
Social network - Fan club - Fakester

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The website is no longer running as a beta test. The slow response time that plagued the site in its early stages seems to have abated. This is partly attributed to a rewrite and conversion of the site's webpages from JSP (via Jakarta Tomcat) to PHP, around July 2004. At the time of the conversion, many people debated whether this proved that scalability of PHP was better than JSP. http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/22_Friendster_goes_PHP.html http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/07/05/FriendsterPHPJavaAndCodingPlatforms.html http://www.evilrob.org/journal/archives/000079.html

Related Topics:
Beta test - JSP - Jakarta Tomcat - PHP

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In February 2005, Friendster introduced an additional blog service which is linked to individual user profiles. Also a new feature to create photo albums and to showcast with user profiles.

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Pamela Anderson has a blog on Friendster. The participants of The Apprentice also have profiles on Friendster through which users can choose and add contestants they support.

Related Topics:
Pamela Anderson - Blog - The Apprentice

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