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The reason why the Nexus One failed is because it was so damned expensive out of pocket.

Friends Testing

Nope, THIS is the proper way to hold an iPhone 4.

Facebook seems to have gotten big mainly by chance. like being the only bacteria in the pietry dish. The only savvy they had was realizing the peitre dish was available and rushing to get there first.

You're right, no one ever thought of social sites before Facebook.

Given the amount of links you posted from that website, you should probably mention that you are quite the star over there, complete with things like these:

Appended below is the IRC log from just minutes ago. As regular readers are probably aware, our reader "twitter" has abusive stalkers ('witch hunters') in this Web site. They followed his footsteps all the way from Slashdot just to discredit him personally wherever he goes, whatever he does. Speaking from experience, "twitter" is intimately aware of Microsoft's dirty secrets and he talks about it in public.

Aw, shucks. This is also where you confessed to your massive sockpuppetry of Slashdot:

They also identify my accounts on the first few posts. They got my GNUChop today and replied to it by cut and pasting a brlug comment.

I understand your activities here are quite the topic of conversation over there.

Worthy of mention also is the fact that you have done nothing but paste links to the Schiestowitz blog for the past year or so. Anyone looking at your comments and journals can attest to that. That blog is of course what some people call a den of paranoia, and other choice things. As for the operator, this is one of the better summaries I've read.

All of this of course pales in comparison to your nymshifting, sockpuppetry, trolling and massively obnoxious behavior that has made you the joke of the day around here. All of that is documented here.

So please, don't pretend that you're some FOSS hero on a mission bringing enlightenment down from the Schestowitz heaven for us poor Slashdotters to gape at in awe. You are a troll, an extremist, just like your friends, and I wish that none of you were involved with free software in any way. You are the worst of the worst. If I need references on OLPC or anything else, I'm sure there are more dependable sources for them than your best friend's "I hate everything" blog. Seriously, this is a man that insults and questions Linus Torvalds' way of life and the amount of children he has because he didn't march to step on a software license. What the fuck. You all should be put in a mental institution. You are worse than the worst shit you've ever tried to make up about Microsoft, as if they didn't do enough actual bad things.

Go away.

Sze says Friendster doesn't need to have a MySpace-size traffic explosion to turn a profit. Says Sze in an e-mail, 'If those users are reasonably valuable and monetizable, I think [investors] can make money on their investment

How exactly are they going to make money?
With those googleads like ads they got there??
http://www.friendster.com/

As we all know, MySQL databases and the PHP (Personal Home Page) language can't be used for building robust enterprise apps (there's not even an enterprise version of PHP). It baffles me to see people building large reliable websites with these technologies. I'm very tempted e-mail their webmasters and ask them how they are defying logic.

The representation isn't the problem. The problem is agreeing what the the relationships mean.

That problem is not the problem that RDF addresses. It just gives you the tools so that you can concentrate on solving that problem instead of worrying about all the crap underneath. It's like XML doesn't address semantics, it just gives you tools so you can focus on semantics without worrying about parsing.

What does "#friend" mean? Does it mean the same thing to program X as it does to program Y? How can you tell?

You read the specification for the vocabulary you are working with. For example, here's the FOAF specification.

To use the XML analogy again, the XML specification doesn't tell you what particular element types mean, because that's outside XML's scope. You read the specification for the XML document type, e.g. XHTML, to find out what an element type means.

who gets to decide what #friend means, and whether this is a global or local definition?

You're forgetting that #friend is just shorthand for a URI. It's not a literal string "friend". If Slashdot choose to expose their friend data with URIs like http://slashdot.org/rdf/#friend that doesn't have any bearing on the meaning of Friendster's data if they use URIs like http://friendster.com/rdf/#friend. They are two separate URIs with two separate meanings that the owners of the domain have chosen.

I know, the next thing you are wondering is how this is of value if everybody makes up their own URIs. Well the answer is, if they want interoperability, they don't just make up their own URIs. Just like people using XML get together, agree on concrete definitions and write specifications like XHTML, the same things happen with RDF vocabularies, people get together and decide what they think #friend should mean, write a specification like FOAF, and use the same URIs.

These are questions that I've never heard answered in any believable manner.

Ignore all the hype from PHBs, this isn't about computers magically understanding arbitrary documents. This is about expressing relationships in a standard way. Of course you need some way of agreeing on what relationships mean, which is why people write specifications. RDF doesn't solve that problem, it's outside RDF's scope. RDF is much smaller and more focused than you think, it's not magic.

http://www.friendster.com/useropen.php?uid=43679

Network. Email everyone you can (and by can, I mean everyone who won't get mad at you for eamiling them that you need work). Try getting into some networking groups like Friendster and LinkedIn.com.

Get a Blog and start writing in it, and include the fact that your looking for work and your trials and tribulations etc. It worked wonders for Odd Todd and who knows who might read your blog. Of course to advertise you're gonna have to read/post in others blogs. Do so wisely.

Most importantly -- believe that you can make it happen and you will. But the key is you have to make it happen -- otherwise it won't.

Do tell me more about this friendster and facebook phenomenon. It must be a whole new paradigm shift in abstract relationship building synergies!

MySpace gets the lowest-life, most guido New Jersey and Long Island trash people I've ever seen, the teenagers who are too dumb to know any better, and a couple of pervs I know in their later 20s who just go there to pick up on dumb 17 year old girls.

Yeah, and they gits lotsa niggers and wops too. Slashdot: Paragon of free thinking and tolerance.

Fox purchased MySpace, and I wish it was someone else like Google.

Why would Google buy myspace? It already has Friendster. The content you see on myspace probably wouldn't fly as well on Google, which may be changing in the next few months as they fight it out.

I just "splurged" and bought myself a $29.95 subscription to Keyhole a few days ago. Now what?

Man, just my luck. Just when I thought being able to show girls how I zoomed into their backyard and saw a fuzzy sattelite photo of them sunbathing topless was gonna get me laid. Now every Joe Schmo geek will be able to do it.

I guess I'll just stick to writing some social network things until it finally happens for me.

What first drew me online and kept me excited for years was the sense of community that people had in the BBS scene before the rising popularity of the Web. Despite many attempts at creating this same feeling on the web from AIM, to Craigslist, Friendster, gMail to even Slashdot or Kuro5hin, I have not been able to develop the same type of relationships. It seems almost bizarre to suggest that a global online community could have a BBQ or meet for dinner at a local fast food restaurant.
People like Jom Jennings of FidoNet and Scott Converse of OneNet really deserve to be recognized by organizations like the VCF. The communities they fostered, perhaps because local dial-up networks kept everything provincal, are probably what I miss about the modern Internet with its spammers, phishers, con artists, Patriot Act, unsecure email and general lack of polite behavior. More than anything else, this misplaced sense of community is what I miss about the early days online.

*laughs*

Sorry, but I put a a lot of credit in the people at google.

I have a million friends!

I doubt that. I've seen plenty of boring Friendster profiles who I'd never contact the person behind, and I've de-Friendster-ated more than a couple of people who signed up and added me, but frankly just ended up not being interesting enough to bother. "Favorite color: OMG-Pink. Favorite Music: Britney Houston."

Thankfully, to keep it interesting we always have the Fakesters.

Friendster and Orkut

A few days ago ronebofh handed me an invite to Orkut, Google's new Friendster clone. I played with this for about 48 hours, adding and inviting various friends to my network and reading the messages that percolated through the network -- probably the only feature of Orkut I'll get much use out of. I'm a married person, not looking for a date, and not living in the Bay Area.

The topic of every message: Orkut itself. According to one message, any random friendless person can conveniently post a message that reaches thousands of users via their friend "networks." In other words, insanely convenient spammage. Another poster replied that this sort of endless nitpicking is sure to turn Orkut into yet another "hippie echo chamber." I think they opened for the Flaming Lips last week at the Trocadero.

Tonight Orkut has been shut down to "implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users." In their defense, the Google staff point out that Orkut is in beta and they did warn us this sort of thing could happen. Ticked off, I decided to check out Friendster, which I somehow skipped up until now.

When I got to Friendster's site, I was surprised to see that Friendster also describes itself as a "beta" version. And that gave me some sympathy for the Orkut administrators, who are only trying to use the word "beta" to mean what "beta" is supposed to mean:

• Beta means "outsiders are welcome to play with this, but don't trust it with your life."
• Beta means "we have run out of ways to break it ourselves and really need some outside input now."
• Beta means "if something breaks, that's good; give us specific and detailed feedback, and don't whine."

But "beta" is not the most offensive phrase on the Friendster home page. "Patent pending" is much worse. A patent on online social networking? I'd laugh if it wasn't so... no, wait, I am laughing. Give me a break, here. Surely this is nonsense no one takes seriously. Right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, according to this news.com story. sixdegrees patented online "social networking" sites in 2001. Two Friendster-like sites have acquired the patent. Now everyone in the field is furiously writing patent applications.

I'd like to invite you all over for a beer, but I can't afford the intellectual property fees.

>> I'd guess the reason it's invite only is to keep things manageable. If you had a community in beta, would you want it slashdotted with new users...

Google News is also in "Beta", as is Froogle. For some reason, they're not using exclusionary practices to limit traffic to these sites...

I'll be surprised if Google keeps it closed like this, as it seems so, well, anti-Google.

For what it's worth, even Friendster is still labled "Beta".

Tribe
No download, runs anywhere. More nerdy, uemphasis on freedom of use, discussion groups. Supports lots of pictures.

MySpace
No download, runs anywhere. Supports restricted blogs, popularity contests, 10 pics. Does not emphasize actual RL friendship dynamics.

Friend of a Friend
Open standard for creting friendster-like network apps. Used by PeepAgg to build OSS system.

There are more, and I'd love to see replies with links to this rapidly growing class of services/apps, with brief descriptions attached. Thanks

So what's the difference between friendster "fakesters" and real life fakesters? Think about it. In a bar there are always a few guys in there who are working it hard to be someone they're not, sometimes not even using their real names, they're often the ones surrounded by the simple-minded blondes who are attracted to their feaux persona. Same goes for friendster. Moving on, imagine if someone walked into a bar wearing a giant Oscar Meyer Weiner costume, immediately he would become the topic of conversation and a good number of people would approach him and become his "friend". This is the same thing that happens on friendster.

So maybe this phenomenon is a little more rampant because the anonymity of the internet allows people to drop a few inhibitions, but the concept is the same. Randomly deleting fakesters is a bad idea. The concept of charging for the service seems to be somewhat of a better idea. I know most of the /.ers will complain "it should be free" yadda yadda yadda, heard it all before. It would be nice if it were free, but I'm sure the folks who work for friendster would like a paycheck. Now, $8 a month seems a little high for friendster, if it were like $2, or even $5 I might consider paying for the service. Regardless, $8 a month is pretty good way to ensure the friendsters and fakesters who really serve some sort of purpose.

And just to piss of the Friendster folks...http://www.friendster.com/user.jsp?id=2339 91 last name, McGuire :).

i've been skateboarding for over 12 years. i was sponsored at one point (which meant that i got free stuff), and i've actually hung out and skated with some of the pros you've seen on tv and in video games. heres some pictures of me skating. ok, bye.

i've been skateboarding for over 12 years. i was sponsored at one point (which meant that i got free stuff), and i've actually hung out and skated with some of the pros you've seen on tv and in video games. heres some pictures of me skating. ok, bye.

This already exists. It's called Friendster. Basically, it works like 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You can only see people that you know through your friends. So let's say I'm trying to date Lurlene...

Homer knows Frink, who knows Snake, who knows Lurlene. Bad example, but if I didn't know Frink I wouldn't be able to see Lurlene's profile.

Sadly, I'm not joking here.

It's a kind of interesting site to meet people and it shows how you are connected to others on the site through your friends.

Friendster tells you what city someone lives in and lists some favorite books, movies tv shows etc.

So far there are only 3 Canadians on friendster, but there are lots from Tulsa OK.

I'm not sure if its exactly what you are looking for, but there are -tons- of topics, and I live in a relativly small city, and there are a few local meetups in the area of differant interests. It's a pretty cool service, and looks like it could grow into something quite cool.

Also see Friendster. Works great in cities like NYC or SF, probably less well in smaller cities. Whoever wrote it seems to think the UK is a lot smaller than it actually is, it's not smart enough to pick cities there, only the country as a whole!