Another take on Friendster

I stumbled upon this funny but true essay or wtv you call it on the Net today. I thought it'll be nice to share it with you guys. It's titled Another Take On Friendster by Emi Soekawa in 2004. I extracted it from www.popculturemag.com. God forbid, I don't want to plagiarise...




It starts out innocently enough. The first time you heard about Friendster you thought, “Wow! Great idea! I’ve met a lot of people in this life of mine and I love answering questionnaires. This rocks!” You do a search on a few heads to see if they’re on (okay everyone you’ve ever met, even if you don’t want to contact them ever, just to see if they’ve gotten uglier/fatter, etc.). Excellent! Alice from camp! She’s still alive? Great! You send her a request message to be added to her list of friends. What? That guy you used to work with for two weeks and never really spoke to? Alright! You’re really racking it up there! You are connecting, you are putting technology to work for you.

Then like all things you do, you take it too far. You start adding people at your current job (never a good idea unless you want them to see how the majority of your friends refer to you as either “Ma favorite skanky ho” or post tales of you ODing on their prescription drugs and falling onto trash on the sidewalk). Not really the image you’ve been trying to present in the office.

After a few weeks you take a look at your list of friends. What the hell? These people do not represent your friend base. There are like three good people in there and none of them have written a testimonial about you yet. You look like a loser. “What the fuck? I hate my friends!” So like a desperate illegal immigrant without a good sweatshop owner to turn to, you start scrounging. You begin hounding your real friends to sign up “Come on! It’s really fun! What, you’re not on yet?” They ask you what it’s good for and you’re like, “Uhh, it’s really great, you can look up all the good friends you’ve lost contact with.” They’re like “Um, anyone I’ve lost contact with I probably didn’t really like.” Okay, you know what you can do with your fucking logic? I’m already in this thing people, don’t try and drag me down!

They call you up at work trying to get you to see some clip of William Hung’s stint on “American Idol” that they just emailed you. All you can think is, “What? Is this really up there with logging on to Friendster finally and writing me a testimonial?” You become embittered with the whole process and one day due to an incident you can ask me about if we’re tight like that, you must cancel your account. Story over. Until I register again on Tuesday. Adios People. And to you guys who never got around to writing me testimonials all I can say is, one time my brother poisoned this person by putting chocolate Ex-lax pieces in a thing of Ben and Jerry’s, so when can you come over for dessert?