I have been addicted to Friendster the last couple of days. It’s fascinating. If you don’t know about Friendster, it’s essentially a networking tool. You invite your friends onto it, and they invite their friends, and you can see who your friends’ friends are, and who your friends’ friends’ friends are, and so forth. Eventually, you acquire a network of people; anyone within four degrees of separation is included in your network. You can see how you’re connected to various people. You can contact them for dates, job leads, and so forth.
I love the social and mathematical implications.
Currently, I have seven people designated as friends, and my network consists of 9,281 people.
Within my network, the person with the most friends has 541 of them. I guess he’s the biggest Lois Weisberg of my network. (That’s a link to a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, if you’ve never read it.)
Within my network, there are 116 single gay men in or near New York City.
I looked up a friend of mine in Los Angeles to invite him into the network as my friend, and it turns out he’s already in my network — only we’re separated by three degrees.
In New York itself, there are a few people to whom I’m connected via two different friends of mine, neither of whom know each other. This just goes to show that when it comes to gay people, New York really is a small town.
Another weird thing is that so many of the single gay New York men in my network are buff and shirtless in their photos. I didn’t know I was connected to so many people who would choose to present themselves that way. It kind of irks me, for some reason, even though I’m sure they’re good people. Well, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends’ friends’ friends.
I’m also surprised at how many amazingly hot guys some of my friends and their friends know.
Anyway, I’m just waiting for Sleepster, which will let you see all the people who have slept with all the people you’ve slept with, and all the people who have slept with them, and so on.
Now that would be scary.
The weirdest experience out of undergrad had to be the Sex Chart. I met this freaky girl at Denny’s one night when I was a soph or jr and we knew some people. She showed up on my door one summer afternoon with a huge piece of paper and we mapped out a Sex Chart (everyone you ever slept with and their known partners.) It covered an entire wall and included the dad from the brady bunch, as well as the lead singer from the red hot chili peppers, and a total of something like 500 people. It was like a propagandistic mural for safe-sex. Thank god I was a very small hub on the chart.