Friendster is not to be confused with FriendFeed, which is exactly how I stumbled upon this one. This network is like RadioShack; no one ever really goes there anymore, and the occasional lost soul that wanders in is bombarded with exasperating sales pitches. And Friendster has something RadioShack doesn’t have: tons of spam from sexbots soliciting webcams and penis enlargement, which is something that irritates me regularly on Skype as well.
Friendster might be a graveyard of activity, but it’s hard to tell if anyone ever used it in the past. With FriendFEED, it’s clear from the scatterings of inactive accounts that there has been some interest, but it’s hard to find even that on Friendster. For one thing, the search functions don’t really work, and the only non-sexbot user I could find was Mashable. Granted, I didn’t look very hard.
It is very clear that the only thing this company has ever cared about is making money.
Friendster
Friendster obtained multiple patents on social networking in 2006, attempting to inhibit the growth and success of other sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much all the others. Looks like that really worked out for them, since Friendster is a ghost town at best. As if that expression of greed weren’t blatant enough, it is obvious on the site as well. The spotlight feature of Friendster involves sending other users cutesy applications which – SURPRISE! – you have to pay for. And that’s assuming you can find other users to receive them.
It seems Friendster never understood the notion that in order for people to use its service, it must offer them some benefit. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bigwigs at Twitter were racking their brains at this moment for some way to generate income for all that bandwidth their users have been gobbling up, but they continue to offer a service that is useful to its users, and so I wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing an ad here or there. Friendster is dead, if it ever were alive, and I don’t think the world is missing much.
