William Blaze has a nice analysis of Friendster. I won't repost it all here - so go check it out yourself. Here's a few comments I have:
- Blaze is right - it's gonna be hard to "catch" Friendster. But I don't believe in competition. I believe in conversations. Only problem is - having a conversation with Jonathan is.... well we'll have to see tonight and Sunday if he's decided to change his "idiot savant" stance or not.
- Blaze is also right about the power of faces and contributory art. This is something Reid refuses to grok. He broke down and added some faces into the LinkedIn interface - but he still doesn't recognize the power of the human face. He thinks it'll denegrate LinkedIn into some beauty match. But as Blaze points out, the pale gray and ugly UI of Friendster only tends to highlight the beauty of all those friend's faces,,,,,, it's one of the most beautiful things there is. A wall of faces. We call it a Facewall. I sure hope Jonathan doesn't think he's patented that. We were doing Facewalls back in '96.
- Blaze doesn't seem to remember Ryze. That also came before Friendster. How come it's growth is stagnant and Friendster is continuing to grow? I'd bet that the interface and goals of the system has a lot to do with it's growth.
- Blaze rightly so sees Abrams as a very lucky idiot savant. Most are. But remember - this is all still the Beta phase. Abrams hasn't announced EXACTLY what he's charging for - or what the premium version gets us. Stay tuned sports fans.
- Blaze goes on and on about the banal interface and quickly refers to Tribe - but I think he's missing something there. There's a LOT more to do at Tribe and we're just starting (I'm a paid consultant to the Tribe.) What happens when Listings are interconnecting systems together? When Reviews are being posted to shared public servers? When dynamic D HTML interfaces allow page viewers to comb through one's Digital Lifestyle? My bet is that Tribe is gonna make Friendster look sick.
- What I'd really like to see from folks like Blaze (and which Clay groks) is that these networks are going to be a dime a dozen. It's not like we're all competing for the same Burning Man whackos. There's Stanford alumni, Indian programmers, British intellectuals, dot com ex-pats, political activists, email users, event organizers, chaos mongers = the list goes on and on. In a world of 10,000 Friendsters - what becomes important is connecting up the various locations of your digital identity and presence together. What's important are open standards, not asshole idiot savants.
So come one, come all - to the song that never stops. The Tribes are forming.
Here's the opening to Blaze's post.........
The Idiot Savant (Friendster Triumphant).
There is a bit of a murmur in the social software going on about Friendster declining or being replaced. "We can literally watch the erosion of these centralized services - in front of our eyes" says Marc Canter, while danah boyd motions "One year from now, i suspect that the current incarnation of Friendster will have faded from people's memories, a fad that was fun to play with and to find people." Meanwhile on the streets I hear a small buzz, people are thinking of leaving Friendster, it eats up too much time... Has Friendster peaked, a few months of real popularity and then goodbye, on to the next breed of online hula hoop? My gut says no, for all the foolishness of its management, I think Friendster is unfortunately going to be dominating the social network scene for at least a few years. Perhaps its even a social software Microsoft in the making, although its doubtful it can dominate with a Bill Gates brutality. The reason? To break it down to two words, Metcalfe's Law.
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[Abstract Dynamics]
