I'm a 21 year old student, studying and socialising in Aberdeen. When not giving my humble opinion o...
I'm a 21 year old student, studying and socialising in Aberdeen. When not giving my humble opinion on products, I enjoy ebaying, IRC'ing and posting on messageboards online and getting drunk offline. Quite a productive existance, let me assure you!
Member since:16.01.2004
Reviews:19
Members who trust:3
You are connected to 14,062 people in your Personal Network, through 27 friends, claims my Friendster home page.
Did you all read that? I have over 14,000 friends! Do you realise quite how special that makes me? Well, actually.. it really doesn't mean that much.
Friendster.com is like a lot of the other 'friend' websites out there. You will probably receive an email inviting you to join friendster, from another online friend, and become part of the biggest and greatest friends network on the planet. The other added bonus is that it allows you to make so many more friends (I mean, look at me, I have 14,000 now!). Oh, on the slightly seedier side (I think), this site also claims to be excellent for dating.
Signup is simple. Enter your email address (which becomes your login), a password, your real name (yea right!) and the obligatory male/female choice. You then get a list of options, from which to choose whether you want to meet new people for dating/serious relationships, friends, activity partners, or whether you are "just here to help". I liked the sound of the last one... though it seems to make little difference (see my friends total from earlier). Oh and the final option is to plug in the email address of the friend who referred you - so that they can immediatly be added to your personal friends network. If you feel a twisted desire to put me as your referring friend, then I suppose I can just about manage another friend, so you may add me "dash@bbarden.com" . Just be aware you have 14,000 of my other friends to compete with!
Once signed up, there are various parts of the rest of your profile to be filled in. It's all fairly basic stuff, from age to your musical interests, to other hobbies to filling in boxes with silly values just so your profile looks interesting (whoever claimed I was vain?). Oh in the same account section, there is also the options to turn email notifications off. I strongly suggest you do this, otherwise you will be bombarded daily with messages.
Finally, most of you will want to upload a personal photo of yourself. Or perhaps even more than one. This is quite simple too. Oh and of course invite ALL your online friends to also join friendster so they too can see your wonderful new online guide, to you!
And then, the wait begins...
This seems to be the problem. Once signed up, there is precious little to do. Okay, so you can browse the other people in your personal friends network. Or do the usual community stuff, like send them messages, or leave notices on their bulletin boards. But then, it fast becomes dull. Very very dull. Apart from checking weekly to see if any new friends have signed up (and I expect some after this review!), there really is nothing to do. Oh you can write testimonials for your friends, letting the world know how wonderful they are. More likely you are interested in receiving testimonials from your friends telling the world, quite how annoyed they are that you tricked them into signing up to friendster. I guess it is nice to have people say nice things about you... but I still dont really get the point.
Oh and I had better let slip how I managed to gain 14,000 friends. Well the personal friends network simply lists all those users who are signed up through seven user link levels. I think it is seven. It effectively means that some of the people in this network are linked to me by affilition through six other people. That is right. It is like being told that you are friends with your flatmates, mothers, best mates, aunt, whose cousin's girlfriend has a friend. In fact that is only 6 links.. but I'm sure you get the picture.
In brutal honesty I have in fact only tricked 27 of my real friends to sign up. And all but two of them dont ever visit friendster anymore. Still... whenever im feeling down, and unloved, a quick visit to friendster cheers me up. I read my testimonials, and try to visualise 14,000 friends at my wedding...
Yes - this website is definetly for the vain. Maybe not quite up there with posting a picture on hotornot.com, but pretty close. Unless you are really serious about online dating, in which case I suppose friendster is a good free alternative. But really there is not nearly enough interaction possible between you and your other "friends", for anything interesting to happen...
But it gets worse. Friendster is unbelievably slow. In fairness, this is probably due to their success. I think I was one of the first few to sign up, when the database ran nice and fast. Now however it can take minutes to even log in. I dont see how friendster makes any money, as there are no adverts - so it doesn't really come as a surprise, that they are rather limited in their bandwidth.
So how tosum up friendster? Well, it is definetly not the worst community to be part of on the interweb. It is all quite nicely, and simply presented, and it enables you to build up a detailed personal profile, and interact in a limited way with your friends. You can possibly meet other people, and the website is completely free too. Having said that, the experience soon becomes very dull. It is a novelty, and once the novelty has run out, your page remains nothing more than a personal profile on the internet. And only then when the slow server allows you and others to view the page. Not really worth the effort.
I cant decide whether to recommend it or not. It isn't flawed. It isn't a bad product. They don't rip you off, or trick you into buying things or clicking silly adverts. It's just rather dull.
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I like friendster a lot. It helps me get connected with my friends that I thought that I have lost or maybe forgotten about.
OKkaraoke 27.01.2004 17:58
This site is very good in theory, but it's so poorly designed. I love the testimonials, but the rest of it is pretty useless. I should write a review of this myself seeing as I was the one who added it to the database in the first place. :)
Lancashire_Angel 25.01.2004 22:22
Very honest. It sounds like it was a fantastic idea that went wrong. Don't think I'll bother. Sharron xxx
Jan 22nd, 2004
very helpful by (95%):
helpful by (5%):
