I know it's perhaps a little old news now, but I finally got around to playing with Friendster. It's an interesting concept, and the implications are pretty huge.
In case you don't know, Friendster is a site that maps social networks of people. You start by filling in your profile and then attempting to find and link with friends you actually know already. Once your real-world network of mates is hooked up with you, your "Personal Network" includes those friends, and their friends, and their friends etc etc. You can search within this huge friends-of-friends network and find people with similar interests, mabye ask someone in between you on the network to introduce you.
Of course the main application here is dating, and that seems to be the main driver for its popularity. But it's also an interesting social experiment. The six-degrees-of-separation experiment mapped online.
This shit could get really interesting when you start looking at the interests of your "Personal Network" of people. I already get a lot of tips about films, music, gigs and the like from my mates. I know my mates' interests, they know mine, so we tip each other off on things we think they might like all the time.
Now imagine we start listing the kinda music we're liking, or perhaps even have that fed in automagically, and you start getting another interesting axis on which to make recommendations. Friendster, hooked in with the Ringo/HOMR/Firefly concept, could get very interesting!
Anyway, if you have a Friendster account and you're a mate of mine, add me into yer list then eh? I'd go and invite loads of my mates except I don't like that myself. Too much like the spam-producing greeting card scam. Give the gift of spam: the giift that keeps on giving!