Re:Social networks: Friendster

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 22:39:56 MDT

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    --- alexboko@umich.edu wrote:
    > It taught me something obvious I haven't realized about social
    > networks until now-- they're opaque. In meatspace, you only know
    > about friends of mine that I want you to know about. In Friendster
    > you know about everyone. So I wonder about the unintended
    > consequences of people who know me running into each
    > other. Still, I like a good experiment no matter how it may blow up
    > in my face, so I Friendster onward.

    Ah,but if you had a Clintonian, dare I say, level of
    compartementalization, you'd set up multiple Friendster personas and
    break up your friends by whatever taxa you wish.

    I noticed this with Sasha, where three or four different social groups
    of friends of his, who had no real idea of the existence of the others,
    all showed up at his funeral.

    >
    > Also, someone apparently is running an interesting experiment-- a
    > disembodied/shared Friendster account named Anarchism that seems to
    > be trying to link up with everyone who's any type of anarchist. If
    > you want to friend it, it's full name (friendster asks you for that
    > when you try to friend someone who is some distance away from you)
    > is Anarchism Tanstaafl, but you
    > could probably guess that from reading the profile.

    I think these disembodied personas act like interests in connecting
    large numbers of people who would not normally have connected social
    networks. Notice that the normal interests only allow you to search
    within your extended social network. These personas link large numbers
    of networks together like big Cisco router farms...

    =====
    Mike Lorrey
    "Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                                        - Gen. John Stark
    Blog: Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.blogspot.com
    Flight sims: http://www.x-plane.org/users/greendragon/
    Pro-tech freedom discussion:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/exi-freedom

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