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Bound together- Popular startup dot-com connects users to thousands of friends of friends of friends

What’s Friendster? That’s the question asked at dinners, at parties, around the water cooler and at other gatherings of the urban tribe in the Bay Area. The answer is a new Sunnyvale dot-com that connects people for dating, making friends, business propositions and plain old voyeurism online.

Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friendster users, mostly ages 25 to 38, tend to be single, college-educated,and part of tightly knit subcultures. Often living far from their families, they find support and fulfillment in their other single friends.

Users can browse through the profiles of their friends, friends’ friends and so on in their network. With 20 friends, a user can be linked to 50,000 or more people. The profiles include photos, favorite books and other interests, along with pictures of their friends on the network.

When users find someone interesting, they can see how they are connected and send a note. Or, they can recommend a match for their friends and search by interests through their database of contacts.

You become the star of your own game of six degrees of separation — based on the idea that anyone can be linked to anyone else in the world via six connections. Friendster links users to the fourth degree, or a friend’s friend’s friend’s friend.

Open to the public since March, the free Friendster beta site now has more than 800,000 users and grows by 20 percent each week, according to company founder Jonathan Abrams.

Abrams created Friendster last year after trying online dating services and finding that he was not "keen on messaging random weirdos." He says people are more willing to pay to connect to strangers at least nominally connected to them.

In the Bay Area — where many people are computer savvy, from somewhere else and seeking connection — Friendster is a hit.

People may not join Friendster with the first invitation, but they do under social pressure from several friends, said Danah Boyd, a UC Berkeley grad student who researches online communities. She has interviewed many Friendsters who dated, including a San Francisco woman moving to Los Angeles to join a connection.

When Ravi Krishnaney logged on to Friendster, he was amazed to see how often he was connected to the same stranger through different circles of friends of friends.

Through Kieran, a high school friend living in Cambridge, her friend Jessica, and her friend Becky, Ravi connects to Nevy Valentine, a fellow San Franciscan. He is also linked to Nevy via Chris, a college buddy now in Los Angeles, his friend Greg, and his friend Smoove.

Nevy, 23, calls herself a "corporate time bomb." In her online photo, she has blonde dreadlocks and wears a black fur bikini top. Neither Chris nor Kieran know each other, nor Nevy.

"I’m impressed by how many people go on it," said Krishnaney, 25, a self- described Friendster addict and president of Melon Moon, an Asian candy company in Emeryville. "Friends who I thought were too cool to get on it, people you’d least expect. And they think the same thing."

By August, Friendster will start charging users to contact people they don’t know directly. The cost will be less than a third of a subscription at online dating site Match.com (which runs $24.95 per month.)

U.S. consumers spent $302 million on Internet dating sites in 2002, up from $72 million in 2001, according to Online Publishers Association.

Other companies trying to cash in on social networks include professionally oriented Linkedin.com in Mountain View, Ryze.com in San Francisco and Zerodegrees.com in Los Angeles.

New York’s Visible Path is a degrees-of-separation site for people in sales.

Everyonesconnected and Itsnotwhatyouknow.com hail from the United Kingdom.

The premise behind these companies is to make visible the social networks between people — the relationships that do not show up in organizational charts or in contacts lists.

Critics warn that law enforcement has the authority to subpoena or access these online records — putting the privacy of users in online social networks at risk. An investigator may want to interview everyone who knows a suspect, out to the second or third degree.

"It’s the equivalent of a dossier on not just you but the people you are with," said Lee Tien, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization in San Francisco. "This would be your record on a silver platter."

Abrams said the site will never sell user information, and he doubts that criminals will use Friendster.

Each online networking community Web site has its own vibe, parallel to real world get-togethers.

"Some cocktail parties devolve into bad business networking, with a local accountant shoving his card in your face," said Marc Pincus, a Friendster investor. He is developing a consumer application for these social networks. "Others, you say, ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ like a Vanity Fair party at a film festival."

To succeed, these sites must reach a critical mass of users in a target community, analysts say.

Sites that have huge databases but don’t spell out degrees of separation include Match.com, with 8 million members, and Classmates.com, which connects friends from school and work friends, with 35 million members.

Andrew Weinrich, who founded SixDegrees.com in 1996, precursor to these networking sites, said that these companies should develop a uniform standard together. Users do not want to re-enter the same information into different sites, he said.

Friendster founder Abrams grew up in Toronto and moved to the Bay Area in 1996, where he worked as browser engineer at Netscape. In 1998, Abrams founded Hotlinks, where users shared their favorite Web sites. CMGI Ventures, the now-troubled Internet holding company, backed the startup.

Last year, Abrams researched the growing demand for online dating. He raised less than $500,000 in angel investment.

Abrams began testing the site with friends in August. The Sunnyvale resident hosted the site on a friend’s server in Seattle until January, when rapid growth forced him to move onto commercial servers. He has gone out with a few people he met through the site, but has been too busy lately to date, he said. His profile lists 153 friends.

Who shows up in a user’s network influences the user’s view of the Friendster universe. Just one friend could connect another to a galaxy of Burning Man ravers, gay hipsters in New York or the local Asian party scene.

Some so-called superfriends with dozens of friends can add thousands of people to a user’s personal network — leading to competitions over who is the most popular.

Fake identities, such as White Trash and Homer Simpson, also abound on the network. There are 19 Kevin Bacons (the actor is at the center of the entertainment universe in a game called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon") and five Gods registered on the site. Abrams said the jokes will be deleted over time.

Erin Scanlon, 25, joined in April. She uses Friendster to keep in touch with existing friends or follow up with friends of friends. Long-lost friends have found her through the site.

Users put up profiles, which also feature testimonials from friends and family, a sometimes heartfelt, sometimes witty form of product review.

"You have something more to go on than someone’s point of view on themselves. You know that this person has friends who trust this person," said Cory Knox, 27, of San Francisco. He lists 133 friends, including his mother.

In her testimonial, his mother writes that Cory, at age 2, climbed up a tree by himself one winter’s day. "He was just perched up there on his bare feet, looking down at the water below him. It didn’t occur to him to be afraid. "

But just as quickly as people have joined Friendster, they could leave, some users say. The value of the site lies in how many friends it can attract and keep.

Knox said he would pay no more than $5 per month for Friendster, perhaps if the site added more functionality.

"As soon as they do something that makes it not worth it to some people, then it becomes not worth it to anybody," Knox said.

E-mail Vanessa Hua at [email protected].

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/06/27/BU181364.DTL&type=business

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