Thursday, March 31, 2005

friendster

Friendster. The once-very-hot craze when everyone oohed and aahed over how the world is becoming so small, because you realise that for some reason, all your friends know each other is some way or another. And everyday you spend hours staring at your computer screen, looking through all your friends' profiles, squinting at the photos of all their friends in the hope that you'll recognise someone and realise, hey! we've got another common friend! Yay my list can expand again!!

Then suddenly the fad just died down and people just stopped loggin in to friendster. actually i think the lousy server problems probably had something to do with it. But then again, maybe it wasn't the servers that were lousy. In those friendster-crazy days the whole world was dying to log into friendster, its no wonder the servers couldn't tolerate all that heavy workload. What an irony that the very fact that friendster was so popular contributed towards its "downfall". (ok lah, maybe not really downfall per se, since it's still around and ppl still use it i guess, but at least the popularity really died down)

Sometimes it is pretty silly how we get hooked onto such seemingly meaningless fads isn't it? Just like the bio-tech bubble in the 80s and the dot-com bubble in the late 90s, all these phases are just what it is called -- phases; without enough content to substantiate itself sufficiently such that it is unable to weather through storms, they die down just as quickly as they start up, as people begin to realise how much they are over-rating the whole fad.

I guess you all may be wondering what got me musing over this in the first place. Well, there exists a few reasons.. One of which is the lectures I have been listening to lately. Can't remember which module it was from already, all my modules seem to be overlapping in content this sem. It must be because now that I am taking modules for my finance major so everything becomes more correlated. Even my tutors are the same for 2 of my modules! Anyway, so he [my tutor] was talking about all those bubbles I mentioned earlier (cf. previous paragraph -- anyway what does cf. stand for? Always use this abbreviation w/o actually knowing what it is..) and how it caused the stock markets to plunge, bla bla bla... and it just got me thinking of all the minor fads we've witnessed. Ok, maybe you won't see the link, but hey, i do. Lol..

Second, and the more pertinent, reason being, someone just requested to be my friend on Friendster. These days i don't ever log in to friendster anymore, unless I receive an email saying that someone has requested to be my friend. And I realised that that "someone" is a primary school classmate whom I haven't seen for years. Looking at her friendster profile and her photos, I realised how much she has changed. Either that or my memory has faded, cuz i noe that if i saw her on the streets now i wouldn't have recognised her. Definitely. And that reminded me of what a neat idea Friendster actually was that got everyone so excited in the first place. It helps us keep in touch with our friends, even friends whom we've lost contact with for a very long period of time. Too bad the neat idea wasn't nearly neat enough for it to be sustainable, huh? Frankly, do you guys still use friendster? Or do you even have friendster in the first place?

Posted by liz at 9:21 pm 0 comments