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WHAT USING FRIENDSTER FEELS LIKE:
I'm in the biggest store with aisles and aisles of boxes that all look the same.

Brought to 32-color GIF out of a Jakob Lodwick analogy in a comment about the visibility of what little upgrades Friendster has deployed. "just some crummy text fields after months of zero development??"

Jonathan Abrams is founder and CEO of Friendster, the most popular of online social network services. From a transcript of his March keynote at SXSW 2004, via FastCompany: What the Heck Is Social Networking?

I'm here because of a goofy little Web site that I whipped up not too long ago.
I noticed in 2002 that friends of mine were talking about using online dating sites.
If people said "business models," it might make more sense, but it's still not very interesting.
A universal yearbook is pretty interesting. It's the Web of trust concept, but it's also the Web of influence.

As a new Orkut user, Jakob told me that he expects to know what his friends are doing. He values groups that enable unlinked discussion, and wants them in Friendster.

Feature sets within the various general social networking websites must be copied in order to stay competitive regarding user aquisition and retention.

Abrams just got a $53 million valuation for FriendsterThe scuttlebutt was that for $5 million apiece, Kleiner and Benchmark each received less than a 10 percent share of an enterprise that was only about a year old and had never earned a dime. They had set Friendster's value at an astounding $53 million., so it's time to talk cash flow. He's proven that the company has a product which users overwhelmingly adopt. Now features (like Groups) take the back-burner to business plans and cash flows.

My guess is that Friendster is interested in letting you know what your friends are buying and selling. They probably have a teams dedicated to eBay and Amazon.com API exploration. (eBay Developers Program - Amazon Web Services).

I am continuing to think about:

• "Sure, I'd like to know what the most popular book bought by my friends in April was."
• When will Outlook's Contacts include support for the developing Friendster protocol?
• Will my mobile phone ever have network directory support, and if so, which companies are most actively developing for this?
• Who will be the first to ink a deal with Plaxo?
• I love the Outlook add-in that LinkedIn uses: It enables me to search my Outlook Inbox + archives for unique e-mail addresses of senders, then matches those e-mail addreses against their existing LinkedIn user database. This is CLUTCH!

Note: Jakob and my roommate Zach run a social networking website which exclusively targets college students. Among the 20,000+ registered users on CampusHook: Jakob Lodwick, Zachary Klein, Nick Gray.