A few more-or-less random notes on Friendster. (The Fakester genocide is one of those semantically overloaded train wrecks that make it hard to write cleanly about.) * Over on the Yahoo group FriendsterRevolution, they seem to be working their way through the Kubler-Ross stages, with bargaining and acceptance starting to appear. Most interesting is the flood of answers to yesterday's off-hand question "What made you create your Fakester characters?" The answers are fascinating -- reflective, funny, and nicely written (in contrast to the usual anti-Abrams/W3 W1LL 0V3RC0M3!!!1! froth.) The posts are also suffused with a certain nostalgia, an emotion you can only have when you abandon any hope of re-creating the lost world. I can't post the answers here, as the messages are for members only, but you can join and read the archive at Yahoo. I do hope they get archived in public at some point, as they are an important part of the current climate. * Danah predicts the demise of Friendster:

One year from now, i suspect that the current incarnation of Friendster will have faded from people's memories, a fad that was fun to play with and to find people. For the next evolution of said software, it's going to be essential for designers to figure out how to provide an environment where people have freedom, while simultaneously empowering people to ignore segments of the population.

I think Danah is right here, though I also think she's right to hedge her prediction by saying "the current incarnation of Friendster", as I think the "next evolution of said software" will include the evolution of Friendster. A million plus users is an awful lot of critical mass. Just yesterday, I demoed Friendster for my class, and I kept finding people in my local network whose connection to me was through Uncult NYC, an informal gathering of like minds, or Gawker.com, Nick Denton's ultra-snarky Manhatto-centric blog. This seems to me to be entirely in keeping with the goal of Friendster -- knowing I'm connected to someone through Uncult (or Gawker or SUPERFUN or or or...) is both useful and different from being connected to them through a person. I'm perfectly capable, irl, of telling the difference in my connection to a friend of my wife, a student at ITP, and someone I recognize from the neighborhood. I might have something to say at some point to all of those people, and it isn't going to confuse me in the slightest that not all of the connections go through unbroken chains of people. Friendster is going to have to adapt to this, because the world is connected in part by things like SUPERFUN and Gawker, and removing that will damage the service. (Private to J. Abrams: Get a Livejournal account, and watch how they handle interests and communities, then note that communities are first-class members of the system. Keep at it til it makes sense to you, because LiveJournal figured out how to create connectivity between people and ideas first, and, as far as I can tell, best.) * Marc asks What's wrong with revenge for a motive for Revolution?, in response to my earlier assertion that the Fakesters are talking revolution but walking revenge. So what is wrong with revenge? I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand, the changes Friendster is making seem consistent with their stated goals at launch, and had they put limits on Fakesters from the beginning, I don't think anyone would have gotten their knickers in a twist. "Can't register as God? Oh well..." On the other hand, I've often noted that the value in social systems is created by the users, for one another, and is not owned by the people who own the servers. Users often go berserk when there are even perceived changes in the power dynamic between themselves and the operator of a site or service, and in this case, the Friendster policy came_ after_ the users had collaboratively created an enormously interesting body of work. The highhandedness of the move was breathtaking. On the other _other_ hand, I'm troubled by denial-of-service attacks, against anyone. As disrespectful as Abrams was of the Fakesters, there are still more than a million users who like the service just fine. Revenge on Abrams, which will do nothing to restore the Fakester movement, will damage the service for the users who don't care about being friends with a Giant Squid or Jesus. A lot of people take it for granted that Abrams shouldn't have done what he did, but it seems no different to me than Star Wars Galaxies limiting players to one character per paying account -- its social programming of a sort designed to make the service work in a certain way. Abrams handled it badly, and may have inadvertently damaged his service by not working with some of his most creative users, but even so, revenge of the sort that damages the new Fakester-limited Friendster seems a punishment much worse than the crime.