Saturday, April 24, 2004

f r i e n d s t e r

join friendster lastnite, in few hours apparently i can explain what friendster is in terms of complexity study.

BUT lame excuse to join in; because a good friend blunt enough to say that she thinks i'm not a true e-gal if i dont join friendster. this needs to add here as i reminder that perhaps i should always try everything new on the net to keep up. what i feel most left out is gaming! ever heard of konami's lifeline that use voice recognition, aim to immerse players? or mogi - item hunt a game at the borderline between the real and the virtual, using gps phone travel round tokyo to cover items which might be good for detaching yourself from home! i would like to try all of these, but still can't find the time. mostly because real online gaming means synchronous interaction, you got to give 100% can't do anything else.

i guess i must have grabbed the idea of complexity better than when i start to study the subject in 2001!

user of friendster is an agent in the friendship environment. their point of view is local because the allowed interactions (i like hollands' explanation of allowable interactions, his cgp-v model of agent) designed specifically like those of bonabeaus' insects or reynolds' boids.

there are 3 hierarchies of friends of which rule has been applied to whom each can interact to. those in the same level of hierarchy can contact each other, and each friendster can also move from one to other hierarchi depends on how close the connection can be achieved.

friendster is an interesting phenomena of online social network.

this is my footnote to one of their survey, they must be think i'm nuts to write this down!

What do you like least about Friendster?

i'm not sure about hierarchies of friends.

but perhaps this is what friendster about: the phenomena of social network emergence. the individual friendster (each user) wont see much about the emergence of the global network of friends but only through local interaction with friends at certain level.

i'm sure there are much more work you can do to develop local interactions between users because local interactions is the important aspect of how sophisticated the gestalt occurs as the result of emergence global phenomena of network of friends. this means to work out relationships between the hierarchies and what features should be develop to support those interactions.

it would be interesting to see what comes out as the gestalt of global network of friendster!