Friend Ster
Gros générateur de rencontres outre-atlantique.
Opinions et Articles
A propos de Danah Boyd...
"She's definitely a pied piper for a bunch of different people," said Joi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. "At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate."
Friendster is built on the premise that friendship is transitive; that is, that if A is a friend of B, and B a friend of C, then A can be a friend of C, too.
Boyd explained the site this way: "It allows you to purposely say who the people in your world are and to allow them to see each other, through a connection of you." An individual registered at Friendster has a home page with photos, a brief profile and photos of people to whom they have agreed to link. That person can then browse his or her network or search it for dates or activity partners.
Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures.... (...)
For instance, when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting. But e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how.
Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network.
(...) The basic idea behind Friendster and other social-networking sites is not new. Neither is the technology, which is based on a business process patent from a 1997 site called Six Degrees?.com that failed because too few people were online at the time. (That patent was recently purchased for $700,000 by two of Friendster's competitors.) Jonathan Abrams, a 33-year-old dot-com survivor conceived of Friendster as a dating site, but people's social curiosity turned it into a place where everyone becomes the center of an unfolding drama (or comedy) of connections. (...)
The Pretend Sters? also skew the site's user data. Currently 3.9 million accounts are registered at Friendster, though it is impossible to tell how many of those belong to real people. That's why 2,619 of the Pretendsters have been hunted and terminated by Friendster Webmasters.
There have also been Fakesters, evidence of how contemporary Americans crave connectedness. Users composed profiles for their pets (and then connected their pets), their colleges (and then connected to their alma maters) and household odds and ends (and then watched the conversation that developed between "salt" and "pepper").
(...)
Mark Pincus?, chief executive of one social-networking site, tribe.net, has sought her advice because she is involved in some of the groups his site tries to appeal to. "Danah's this researcher, but she also lives the whole thing," he said.
Her academic supervisors are envious of her advantage.
"I look at cyberspace the way a deep-sea diver looks at the sea: through a glass plate," said Boyd's academic adviser, Peter Lyman, a professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. "She is out there swimming in it." (...)
(Source New York Times Michael Erard? 
http://www.iht.com/articles/119681.html)
Dernière modification le dimanche 7 mars 2004 9:56:59
