Bizarre but humourous
February 13th, 2006 RachelAs I spellchecked a document in Word, "Friendster" was tagged as misspelled.
The first suggestion?
Fraudster
Hmmm…odd, totally unrelated I’m sure. But worth sharing.
Friendster = Advertister
February 13th, 2006 RachelI got an invite for Friendster in 2003. I signed up, had one friend and never went back on there. Never posted a picture and listed only three things as interests.
"Riding, Running, Yoga".
Fast forward three years and I’ve got a spot on Myspace, check Facebook more frequently than I care to admit, and have even tried Yahoo 360 to see what it was all about (which does not provide me with a tidy URL to show off…big no-no number one!).
So, for a giggle, I made my way back over to Friendster to see what I had been missing all these years. Well, it wasn’t much. Compared to the social networks that came after, Friendster is primative, difficult and so full of advertising it made my head hurt.
First issue, I have no recourse to just grab the account I already had and away we go. Yeah, annoying for me, but also annoying for them…see, they have this stupid quirky feature that shows when someone last logged on. Two days, a week, three weeks…three weeks…oh right. That’s how far it goes back. So, li’l old me who hasn’t been on there in 3 years shows up like this:
That is lame…so now every account that I see which says more than 3 weeks (which if you aren’t that committed to the site isn’t that long of a time…) looks dead. Like that one, sitting right there.
Here’s another fun view - what I get to look at when I log in. This is supposedly my "home".
Riiiiiiight…this is really warm, and inviting, and smells like cookies and cinnamon all the time (it’s my ideal home, it can smell how I want it to).
The process for finding people and messaging them is also not exactly intuitive. But, that doesn’t really matter anyway…my boxes are still packed from when I "moved in" to this slum of a "home". But, it was worth it to get a good look at how NOT to set up a social networking site. If Amazon or Google or Microsoft or another one of the big guys buys this thing, they’ll be hardpressed to turn it into something worthwhile again.
I like what Joshua Allen said over at NetCruciable:
In my opinion, managing a social space is way more about being a club
promoter than about being a technologist. And sometimes being a good
club promoter is knowing when a club needs to be retired.
While a site has to easy to navigate and not too buggy or difficult to load (ahem, wake up Myspace…though to your credit you’re getting a little better), it’s more than just clean code.
And it’s also a LOT more than just having 10 million dollars in VC funding.
