Friendster Legitimacy?

I’m sure you’ve heard of Friendster by now. The graph-theory-gone-bad web site which is trying to unseat match.com with it’s huge <1999>viral marketing</1999> push. I figured it was one of those interesting communities which would live in online discussions only, like Kittenhate.com.

But that view changed yesterday when I was talking to a non-geek friend at a BBQ and she wanted me to send her some information and instead of giving me her email address said, “I think we’re linked on Friendster”. It was the best geek-legitimizing comment I’d heard all day, or maybe it was just the beer. So I went through tonight checking on existing friends to see who else had joined recently that I needed to link to. Hoping to push into the quarter million connection range pretty soon.

In any case, I’m interested to see what FSP (Friendster Service Provider) sites show up (like all those “eBay Service sites). Maybe companies that will arrange a “Table for Six Degrees” situation, or people selling shirts with connection graphs on them.

And speaking of graphs, two things that Friendster needs to do… First, make it possible to show how many other ways your connected to someone who is already your friend. To someone whose “In a committed relationship” and “Just here to help”, cruising around to see how intertwined your friend trees get is really about all the entertainment we get out of the site. Also, they should offer a callable “Friendster Counter” so people can show a realtime number of how many people are in their personal network on their own web page (I’m currently connected to 187185 people through 35 friends). Get on it Friendsters! Well, maybe after you fix your scaling problems.