Let me first say that this is somewhat a hypocritical post , with my affiliation of being a blogger (yes, *everyone* wants to find out what i'm up to), as well as the networking tool being mentioned.. but anyways, this morning in my grumpy, cant-get-back-to-sleep state, I logged onto friendster, to check out the progress of my friends accumulation score - because hey , isn't that what friendster is for? :S

*shakes head*. It occurred to me that friendster is indeed a nasty piece of work. Besides the multitudes of "Dating Tips" "Hot sexy women" and those insane "friends" requests from anonymous people who are connected to your brother's friend's boyfriend's uncle's sister's friend, there are some truly dangerous aspects on this networking tool.

I (and my fellow friendsters) can freely admit that one of the most dangerous aspects of friendster is its stalking ability. Interested in finding out who Alison is going out with? Check friendster. Interested in finding out whether Billy and Bob are still friends? Friendster. Interested in finding out what your year 1 crush is up to? Heck- friendster can do it ;) Friendster gives you the ability to stalk and find out all kinds of things about your networked "friends", and what's worse - you can actually turn *off* your identity so people don't know whose stalking who. I found this out only because I went to a friend's page and she told me off for being a very very bad stalker. hehe :D

Now, another disturbing thing i've noticed is freedom of information. One glance at my network's "top searches" (whether or not this may be true) indicates that my 8082 second degree network has been interested in the following:

Now, I can understand that being graduates or nearly there graduates, my network would be interested in resume how-to. And i can certainly understand the apple ipod search, as well as the adidas search, because I have probably searched for both many times in the past. And being the *truly* understanding person that I am, i can even stretch to understand "how to tell if she likes you" "zodiac love match" and "love quizzes"..

But comeon people... "love calculator"!!!?? ,... *sigh*.. and i thought my network is cool :p hehe kidding :D (but not about the love calculator part!).

And number 3, friendster is truly a tool for marketing, or at least for love of oneself. There are so many people on friendster with 30 or so photos of themselves. There are even people with collages of fifty shots per collage. There are people that take photos of themselves a million times, and put them all up. Self-marketing at its finest i think :). To be on the safe side, I only have 9 narcissistic photos of me and my friends on friendster ahhaha .

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