PositiveMode

Is Friendster Dead?

Blogging being this year's method of distracting onesself (is that a word?) from exam period, my attention was called to another distractor from yesteryear (literally): Friendster. All but the most out-of-touch of you undoubtedly are at least somewhat familiar with this free site that allows you to confirm your friendships online (although its scope may have been bigger than I once thought - I learned recently that some people have been using this site to hook up with strangers. The closest I ever came to that were the handful of messages I received from people oddly impressed by my somewhat obscure reference to to David from the Real World New Orleans' "Come on Be My Baby Tonight").

Friendster seems to have decided they needed a lot of value-added services to keep people coming back, including birthday notification (which is actually sort of nice) and Friendster Blogging (I won't say this is a total insult because I'm totally unfamiliar with its features, although any serious blogger will almost certainly reject the use of this service; it's sort of like buying a baseball glove at the grocery store). Despite the extreme folly of many of these other new features, Friendster finally Jumped the Shark with the recent addition of horoscopes, that try to tell you how you're likely to get along with individual people on a daily basis. I don't even understand what they were thinking with this one.

Today, I declare Friendster dead. I will probably still occasionally check it, however, out of long-term internet habit.

posted by PositiveMode @ 7:29 PM