Some people view the phenomenon of Fakesters as a risk to the Friendster vision of an effective friend-of-a-friend dating network. Others abhor some users' tendency to add random people to their friendster lists to augment their connectivity. I believe that all these problems indicate social urges that might be satisfied cleanly, were not for Friendster founders' tunnel vision.
Fakesters
People are not only being creative with their invention of fakester profiles. They're also screaming out that Friendster is lacking in more complex ways to form social networks . The idea that friendship is the only type of social relationship that exists in this world is simply dumb. The solution is for Friendster to allow for the creation of groups or clubs that anyone can then associate with.
Friendster hubs
If your friendster list is parse, it might make sense for you to find a well-connected individual or two and request them to become their friendster. This could greatly enhance the size of your Personal Network. Why would anyone do that? Well, simply to increase the results of one's user searches, thus allowing for more possible encounters. If this is a dating site and dating is competitive, you have to expect users to do this.
To discourage this kind of behavior, which arguably pollutes the meaning of the friendster relationships, the solution is just to allow for everyone to determine the way their Personal Network is calculated. In other words, an option should be given for users to specify the maximum number of hops allowed in searches. Why arbitrarily limit who users can meet?
A similar option can be done for the other end of a search, to regulate privacy. Everyone should be able to specify the maximum number of hops allowed before her profile is revealed to the searcher.
Posted by juliob at September 22, 2003 01:53 AM