'FRIENDSTER' by Callum Lukita

I first discovered FRIENDSTER on the NET over two years back when I received an INVITATION from a friend to join, sent to my e-mail address. At the time, net communities and chat rooms were already well established. Friendster entered the scene in a different and refreshing manner as it offered a more real expansion to the interactive net community genre. Significantly visual in presentation, real identities are posted worldwide as you, as the user, interact within Friendster as yourselves, not an anonymous.

Upon entering you are required to SIGN UP with a personal private password for LOGIN IN each time, then creating MY PROFILE of your own self with personal photos and fun details. This profile represents your true form, status, age, whereabouts, and interests. And whalla, quite simply you have your own little HOMEPAGE within Friendster.

Consequently, you are then able to view profiles in other members’ homepages within this online program, as you are now free to roam across friend communities, starting with that very one friend who invited you in the first place. The program today holds over 24 million members, or friends, that you are able to browse. That is, if you can find them all. Users are updated of their friends’ activities, birthdates, recent profile and photo changes.



You are expected to invite others in the community to become your friend, thus creating your direct friend relations located in your MY FRIENDS archive. This record is then displayed and stored on your homepage. To date I only have 136 friends ☹.
Another feature is where each member may write a TESTIMONIAL about a friend member who may or may not approve this text to be posted on their homepage. To date I only have 11 testimonials, excluding one or two I just had to reject. Accordingly, you are then able to read testimonial statements of others as you browse; getting a better sense of the people you are viewing.

Another prominent feature allows you to send and receive short text messages to and from friends, supplied in your own message INBOX – therefore combining a practical e-mail service to this program.

Also, in MEET PEOPLE there is a handy search engine that allows you to find missing or wanted friends.

Upon the first 6 months of joining, after getting the hang of it, and despite using a painstakingly slow dial-up connection, I went berserk – going through friends of friends of friends and of their friends, getting absolutely lost at times, tracking my way back, finding long lost friends as far back as primary school friends, inviting and sending messages all over the place. Exciting indeed. The program today has since been expanded in size and is constantly updated. Hundreds of personal pictures can now be uploaded into your photo profile, compared to the restriction limit of only 5 photos (jpegs) two years back. Furthermore, you can now create and view your own personal BLOGS, post BULLETINS, join DISCUSSION GROUPS, as well as upload and share personal VIDEOS (Mpegs) on your homepage.



Many similar communities have since been established in competition, making Friendster today not in anyway exceptional in its form and functions as an interactive net community program – Hi5 and Yahoo Messenger to name a couple.
Nevertheless, being as popular as ever, Friendster will still continue to grow with joining members (some members even own up to two or three Friendster homepage accounts), as it acts and serves an interactive social medium within a very social context. Thus it is self-reliant in its growth. As do thriving communities in real life gradually expand and develop, popular communities in cyberspace will also grow and span to all its ability.

http://www.friendster.com