Friendster boredom

May 30, 2003

In reply to my little “Friendster rant”:http://www.nonliteral.com/archives/2003/05/30/wheres_the_love_baby.html of yesterday, “Marc”:http://blogs.it/0100198/ (who I wish I could figure out how to trackback) asks the question:

“Hey Chuck - whatever. What sort of social scene do you think you WOULD participate in? Gaming? Intellectual discourse? Community activities? Church Sports? Where does cyberspace meet meatspace in your universe?”

Any… All… That isn’t the problem, not so much anyway.

After I signed up for Friendster, going through my address book to send invitations, I pretty much divided everyone up into friends who I thought might respond, friends who were very unlikely to, and business associates who probably wouldn’t appreciate it (or would consider it spam).

I sent invites to the first group, got four signups, and apparently they’ve either not pursued it, or haven’t had any luck getting invitees of their own.

So where does that leave you? You can’t go out exploring the rest of Friendster to see if people you do know that you might not have thought of have signed up, and you can’t go out searching people outside your network on common interests. Or at least I haven’t figured out how to do either of those things. So for me that pretty much leaves things at a dead end.

What I’d kind of hoped for was perhaps a generic tool for building and searching communities of interest—perhaps like a dating site, where everyone puts themselves and their interest on display and can field messages from folks with similar interests, but without (necessarily) the dating aspect. (Not that I’d pass up a date