Friendster, Xanga popularity rising with college students

Yes, there is a website called Friendster.com. Yes, I registered for a domain name at the insistence of the myriad of profiles on my AIM buddy list telling me to do so. With the increasing popularity of sites such as Xanga, Friendster and Tribe.com, its nearly impossible to ignore this growing trend of posting your personality online.

The website wasn't as ADD oriented as I thought. No flashy advertisements telling you to do x,y, z and the like, just a simple registration process that requires your basic e-mail and contact information for other Friendster enthusiasts to get in touch with you. Then I had the option of creating a profile. I actually can't understand why this is always the most fun part. Perhaps for the same reason that I'm attached to reading other people's AIM profiles.

I continued with my registration process and decided not to go for the whole personal thing. So, according to fellow Friendsters, I'm a 68 year old female from Angola who likes to eat ice cream. I clicked OK, and I was all set.

Now the best part of all this, besides the profile creation, was seeing the testimonials at the end of registration. It's probably a way to assure you that Friendster is fun, safe and definitely, certainly worth your time. In fact Daniel from Wyoming said that "Friendster is an awesome site with very cool capabilities allowing users to "break the ice' and meet possible cute chicks!" Wow, that's assuring. Maybe he could boost Giga Pet sales with that kind of articulation.

So in the end I wondered how these people could possibly find the motivation to keep these websites afloat. The most popular ones don't charge users a cent to maintain their profiles and Internet relationships. According to http://www.Wired.com, these start-up websites use their tools to help people share information, and represent the next generation of "community' on the Internet. But they haven't yet found a way to profit.

Investors would naturally be wary. They are giving money at the start-ups as if one was destined to become the next Amazon.com, even though their future cannot assure that any will be more profitable than e-mail, instant messaging or previous Internet communication tools

In order to fund maintenance costs, most of the start-ups are trying to create venues for electronic commerce more cleverly into the Internet communities of the future than it has been, say, at DinnerAtEight.com, Monster.com, and other early classified listing sites.

According to The Washington Post, co-founder Mark Pincus views Tribe and its rivals as social versions of Napster, the music-sharing site, because they help people make Internet connections to exchange information. The goal of Tribe is then essentially to create a neighborhood of interest that will appeal to advertisers, particularly local merchants and other businesses that will potentially sell to users.

Businesses such as Amazon.com and Ebay.com, can in fact attribute much of their success to 'piggy-back' advertising.

Whatever the case may be, and my cynicism aside, these sites can be viewed as an experiment to see just how well Internet communities fare. Ignoring social consequences, so far so good.