I resisted for over a month to sign up on friendster. And now I request others to be my friend. It is SO odd, it really is. I am sitting literally in a room with Mako and Micah and we are all on wireless, goofing off with “Friendster.” Yes lame, but there is more going on than geeks geeking out. We all play and search as a “joke” but the line between using friendster as a joke and using friendster as friendster is a fine one. We get new invites and we proceed to accept, we add new photos, search for others we know, search for those with shared interests, laugh at people’s pictures, and see who might be in fact be interesting to meet in our respective cities.

What amazes me is that I know only pretty my “tech” oriented friends use friendster. This can mean the hardcore “geek”techies, the dotcom web designers, the apple hardware designers, the indy media activists, the bloggers, etc. Though it is eerie that we all have signed up on friendster I think the fact that we can’t “resist” signing up, even if only as a supposed joke, signals how embedded we are in these technologies and spaces. It is not so strange for us to learn of others via web pages and blogs, and make connection on email and irc and since we are glued on the computer for a good 8 hours a day, why not go ahead to friendster? For some it will just be a joke, for others a fad, but I have this feeling that friendster is not going anywhere any time soon.

It reminds me also of this elementary school technique of “keeping track” of friends, of learning their interests, and in such a way where you could compare and contrast it with other friends. It was called a slambook: a notebook the first page which was a list of numbers which were assigned to a person by signing up next to the number. Then the “user” of the slam book answers the questions which are on each page, the answer which is underscored by thier unique number id. Then you can have insight into people’s inner lives and likes and dislikes and carry it around as personal property in your notebook. Strange too and of course there are now online slambooks.

If only I had an online slambook while in elementrary school!!! The one time I got sent to the principal’s office was in 5th grade because I had one or two mean questions about “Christine Diaz” a dear friend who I routinely fought with. And there was nothing like revenge through codifying everyone’s opinion of her in my slambook. If only I had a password protected slambook site, it would have been harder for her to confiscate my goods and send them over to principals office.