You know you’ve arrived when your website name becomes a noun or a verb (and people making fun of your name in school doesn’t count, which rules me out). Friendster, the social-networking service I mentioned a few weeks back, will hit 1 million users this week, and is expanding at a rate of 20 percent a week, Wired reports.
So much so, that it quotes Danah Boyd, a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. student researching online social networks, as saying the word “friendster” is entering common usage. Just as “googling” now means looking something (or usually someone) up on the Internet, “friendster” is now used to describe a person that someone meets or knows through the network. “A friendster is not exactly a friend, but rather an online acquaintance about whom a lot is known, thanks to the degree of disclosure in their social resume, which, of course, may or may not be true,” Wired says.
Worse, or better, depend on whether you think this is a good way to get to cram your PDA address book, Friendster networks are popping up for sale on eBay. Friendster engineers are also working on an interface that lets users see their social networks as an array of faces arranged like a spider’s web on their screens.