Goodbye Friendster

It was back  in 2000 when my friend Jayvee Fernandez asked me if I had a Friendster account. "You should create one Rico," he said. "It lets you send messages to your friends and even upload pictures of yourself!"

In many ways, making a Friendster profile introduced me to the online world. The site said you needed an email address to register, so I created an account on Yahoo Mail. I even went through the trouble of scanning an old family picture, cropping everything out so that only my face remained.

Friendster was also why I started surfing daily. I'd check what my growing number of Friendster friends were sharing, and see if anyone sent me private messages through the site.

The site was very basic back then, with few if any controls over the privacy of your Friendster profile. Users could only publish one update at a time, and they could share only five pictures, if I'm not mistaken. Figuring out which of my pictures would stay up and which ones I'd delete was quite a dillema, so I learned how to manage photos on my computer.

And since I was naive about the dangers of sharing information online, I'd spend hours managing my Friendster profile, adding minutae such as my high school, hobbies, and the kind of companionship I was interested in (Men, Women, or Just Friends). Fleshing out your online profile did have one benefit though: it made it easier to look for schoolmates and orgmates you could add as friends.

But perhaps the most popular feature of Friendster back then were the testimonials. They were simply brief messages your Friendster contacts would write about you, mostly polite opinions ("he's a fun guy to hang out with!"). More rare were blunt judgments, since testimonials only appeared on a user profile when approved. A social acquaintance once accepted a testimonial saying "I really don't understand what the hype about you is, man".

Testimonials were digitized proof of your influence. The more you had, especially from "important" people, the more significant you seemed. The more you mattered. You’d often hear friends and even new acquaintances ask one another for testimonials — a pathetic habit that I was unfortunately guilty of.

Friendster is held up as a social networking pioneer, with good reason. The core Facebook features we unconsciously rely on, sending messages to and sharing pictures with friends, became popular through Friendster.

Unfortunately, Friendster could never maintain its first-mover momentum. The site suffered from many outages during the early years, as its backers struggled to keep up with the growing demand for its services. Even during this time, some Friendster users were already migrating to other social networks. The first true social networking site was also slow in introducing new and more useful features, a void that competitors like Facebook picked up.

A less considerate theory holds that as more jejemons discovered Friendster, "polluting" the site with barely legible camel case status updates and profile info, original users were pushed away. Whatever the case, I moved on to Multiply by 2002. Multiply, which has also lost users to Facebook, was one of the first sites to offer unlimited picture, music, and video uploads.

So this goodbye of sorts is really late. I stopped using my Friendster account almost a decade ago. And it comes after the end.

By May 31, the site would have completed its phase out of the social networking features it pioneered, implementing its rebranding as a "social entertainment" site. Users were allowed to download their profile info, including pictures and testimonials.

Friendster’s backers have accepted Facebook’s dominance of the social networking industry. In fact, you can use your Facebook login on the new Friendster.

Yes, my goodbye may be too late. But for a site that held my hand when I started exploring the online world, something that would later define my career, it’s the least I could do. Thanks for the memories —and the testimonials.