Page 5 of 5
"The idea is how you would really meet someone at a beach party," says Friendster COO Lindstrom. "We want people to feel comfortable, for people's behavior to be what's normally socially acceptable."
Abrams says he wants Friendster to be "like eBay" in its mass appeal. But not everybody watching the Friendster phenomenon thinks this is the greatest business strategy.
"Friendster is going up against Match.com and Yahoo! Personals, which are huge," says David Card, an analyst who covers online dating sites for Jupitermedia, a Darien, Conn.based firm that sells research reports to corporations about trends in the information technology industry. "The only way to compete is to appeal to a niche, whether it's bondage, or fetish, or black, or gay. His niche could be 'interesting' people, but if he doesn't like 'interesting' people ...."
Of course, what's socially acceptable to one user is censorship to another. And many fakesters argue -- convincingly -- that their behavior is no more fake than a lot of realsters'. It's a cliché that everybody bends the truth in a personal ad. And even on Friendster, which is full of hipsters pretending they're not on the site for dating, there's just as much pretense. For instance, how much do you really know about a guy who lists his interests as "unnecessarily speaking of himself in the third person" and describes himself as having "my drivers license and an eliptical [sic] soul"?
"At least we're more real about being fake," gripes one fakester.
In the final analysis, Friendster is Jonathan Abrams' beach party, and he gets to decide who is acceptable and who isn't. He built his site as a way of getting himself dates, not to chat with a Jesus impersonator.
As we talk, Abrams admits that Friendster's success has killed his social life; it's more than a little ironic that he has his very own dating site, but no time to date. He asks me if I have any cute single friends. I do, and one's even a Friendster member. But I have to point out that her online picture is of a funny little schmoo-like shark head. Abrams rolls his eyes and opens up my profile page to look at my collection of friends, many of whom present distinctly nonhuman miens.
"Oh, I get it. Your friends are all smartass types," he says in exasperation. He types a message to my shark-faced friend. "Hi Kerry," he writes. "Your profile looks interesting. Too bad you have such a silly picture."
