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Once you're a member, you can send and receive messages from people in your social network, and post announcements on your page like "Hey, friends, I'm having a garage sale this Saturday!" In the "testimonials" section of your profile, your buddies write glowing reviews about you, and vice versa.
Friendster has obvious benefits for single people, but has proven captivating even to those not looking for love. There is something wonderful about seeing the Six Degrees of Separation rule in action, for one thing. When I read an article about Friendster in Slate, for instance, I searched for the name of the writer on Friendster, and saw I was connected to him through three different friends. There's also the voyeuristic entertainment value of reading strangers' profiles. (I learned that the Slate writer likes to exchange mix tapes in the mail with people who send him homemade artwork.) And because of the network effect, the more people who jump on Friendster, the more interesting it gets. Old friends resurface, and you can see the overlapping rings of your social circles, all in one place. It's a way to know a little bit about a lot of people you've always wondered about.
To register with Friendster, you must agree to be yourself in your profile. However, it's easy to break that rule. Unlike other matchmaking sites such as Yahoo! Personals and Match.com, Friendster doesn't review each profile before it goes live, so it's simple to create a phony one and upload a digital photo from the Web to illustrate it. Voilà! You've created a fakester.
It's hard to know what percentage of Friendster users create fakesters (the company doesn't track that), but you can tell from using the site that the number is high. Fakesters are everywhere. There are at least a dozen Deaths and more than 50 Jesuses. There's Harold, and also Maude. Anna Wintour and Snoop Dogg are there. There's Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. Gay Pride and Gay Flag. The week that U.S. troops knocked off Uday and Qusay Hussein, the men's gruesome dead faces appeared together as a Friendster profile.
Most fakesters are simply pranksters. Arthur Ratnick, a 35-year-old cook from Rochester, N.Y., joined Friendster shortly after it launched in March as a fakester named Pure Evil. His photo was a red box with "evil" written on it in black letters. Ratnick hooked up with other fakesters with handles such as Big Corporation, Money, and George W. Bush, writing to them in the voice of his character. He then posted the exchanges to his bulletin board, so his Friendster friends could follow his exploits, like a soap opera.
Big Corporation: Howard Dean is a good person, and believes in fairness and honesty. Thus, he is an obstacle to my mission, global domination. He must be stopped.
Pure Evil: I wouldn't worry too much about it, old chum. A puppet head is a puppet head. If it is groomed like a newscaster then it suckes [sic] from my teat ...
Big Corporation: Excellent. My worry was misplaced. thankyou [sic] for the reassurance.
Ratnick uses his fakester as a creative outlet, and to connect with other people who share his bizarre sense of humor.
"In Rochester, when you do weirdo stuff it's hard to get a reaction. It's a small city," says Ratnick. "But on Friendster, there were people who knew what I was doing immediately, and were willing to play along with it, or expand on it in completely imaginative ways."
Ratnick became so chummy with a fakester named Jesus, the nom de Net of a young man in North Carolina, that he gave him his password so he could baby-sit the Pure Evil profile. (Jesus posted testimonials, approved friends, and wrote messages for Pure Evil while Ratnick went camping for a week.)
Real users often add fakesters to their friend lists like "charms on a charm bracelet," as one user put it, to show other people what type of things they're into. So if you're a lefty politico, you might befriend the fakester Noam Chomsky; if you're a hedonistic partyer, you might befriend Nitrous.
Other people invent fakesters to expand their virtual Rolodex. When San Francisco writer Lisa Sebasco first joined Friendster, she created a real profile and connected it to her real friends. Sebasco, 38, was looking to hook up with other women. But few of her Friendster friends were gay, and her greater Friendster network (friends of friends) did not contain many gay women.
To see if she could attract more lesbians, Sebasco created a fakester named after a dyke bar in the Mission called the Lexington Club. It worked -- more than 200 women asked "Lexington" to be their friend, and suddenly Sebasco had a passel of hotties to check out. The Lexington profile became such a dyke magnet that it was mentioned several times in the "women seeking women" section of Craigslist. (Similarly, the Stud is a popular profile on Friendster, as is the Endup.)
"I feel a bit sad when Lexington gets a friend request or message at 11 o'clock on a Friday or Saturday night because it means that someone is home in front of their computer instead of out trying to, um, get some," writes Sebasco in an e-mail. "On the flip side, I think 'Hey, at least they're checking out the girls in the Lexington network.' Heck, it might even be some girl's first small step in exploring her sexuality."
Though some Friendster users find fakesters annoying or silly, others see them as one of the online community's more interesting aspects. For every Killer Green Bud or Dickface fakester profile riddled with spelling errors and unimaginative screeds, there are three twisted sendups of American pop culture. Take Retarded Raver, a 20-year-old community college dropout and aspiring DJ who writes that he likes to "put glowsticks on the end of strings and spin dem around."
