Friendster rants....

There was a time not so long ago, perhaps a few years back, that having an account on Friendster was the "in" thing to do. Virtually everyone who had access to a computer and the internet was into it, and I was no different.

Not only did I actually exert the effort to look up friends of mine, I actually went to the extent of browsing the profiles of people I don't know for the purpose of inviting them to be on my Friendster list. It wasn't an unusual thing to do in those days. Almost everyone I knew was doing it as well. We even had a term for those who were truly bent on expanding their friend lists whatever the cost. We referred to them as kina-career ang Friendster. These are the type of people who would actually have shots of themselves taken at a photographer's studio just for the sole purpose of posting the pictures on Friendster. Fortunately, I was never that deep. :-)

After a while the novelty kinda wore off, and I hardly logged on my account anymore. Occasionally I would, but I would be bombarded by all sorts of inane and nonsensical bulletins, messages trying to get me into all sorts of commercial ventures and pyramid schemes, offers for self-help seminars, and all sorts of trash.

Then Friendster "improved" and offered customizable profiles and blogging services, among other things.

The vast majority of those who customized their profiles ended up plastering them with all sorts of blinkies and background images with colors or patterns which made the text on them virtually impossible to read. A lot of people also jumped on the blogging bandwagon via Friendster's new blog service, which is quite pathetic to say the least, when compared to that offered by "real" meat and potatoes blogging services like Blogger, TypePad (the real deal, not the castrated version offered by Friendster) and WordPress. Suffice it to say that I have hardly seen any blogs of note on Friendster, and if you're looking for good blogs to read, that doesn't really seem to be the place to find any.

All of sudden, to me at least, Friendster didn't seem to be a cool place to hang around anymore.

So what's a guy to do? At first I thought of deleting my account, but it would seem such a waste considering I did manage to build up a friend list with a lot of genuine friends, and I did get to make and receive a number of sincere testimonials (even though admittedly, I got a few which were of the copy/paste variety).

I did the next best thing. I deleted people whom I didn't know from my friend list. The only people who remained on my friend list are those whom I actually know, those I actually met, regular chatmates and fellow bloggers.

My friend list ended up being half as large as it was when I started. Initially I had 238 friends on my friend list. After my deletion spree had ended, only 104 remained. I may be 134 friends short, but the 104 are all real people whom I am actually familiar with.

If you have the time and are so inclined to, I recommend you do the same. Not only will you end up clearing your friend list of people you don't know, you'll save yourself from the aggravation of having tons of asinine bulletins cluttering up your Friendster Home page.

I guess the moral of this post, if you can call it that, is that your Friendster account, like everything else in life, could probably use a little cleaning up now and then. I know mine did. :-)