Friendster Disaster

Don’t get me wrong… I’m all for Friendster.  In fact, Friendster is the only community site where I maintain an account – except for Downelink, of course but that’s only because it’s a specialized group site for the GLBT community.

However, I can’t help but notice that Friendster is becoming more and more of a disappointment over the years.  While Google is getting better and better with their new features and services including Gmail and Google Talk, not to mention their Blogger add-ons, Friendster doesn’t seem very aggressive in terms of improving their basic function – let alone adding new features and services that actually work.

In the earlier stages of Friendster, people have always been complaining about slow download times in spite of having fast internet connections (so just imagine how worse it is for people using dial-up).  But people understood that and took it as it is.  In fact, we even got used to testimonials magically disappearing, friends appearing both in your Pending Requests list and your Friends list, profiles with ZERO friends (you might think the person’s a loser!) or an alert saying you have a Message but when you go to the Inbox, there’s none.  (Just a short anecdote on missing testimonials:  A friend of a friend even posted a bulletin saying, “MY TESTIS ARE GONE!” Incidentally, that friend is a guy so that statement didn’t sound too nice.)  The list could go on and on.  Each and every Friendster member definitely has a story to tell about a system problem or two.  But again, we just got used to it.  

Recently, they finally gave in to what the general public might have been clamoring for for the longest time – profiles that support HTML and CSS codes.  In addition, they even added Friendster Groups, as well as a Who’s Viewed Me feature.  The weirdest thing about it though is they all stopped working!  I don’t know if it’s just me having issues, but my customized profile is not displaying (though I’ve already seen others which seem to be working fine, but they’re very few now), I don’t see any links leading to the groups and even the direct links I have aren’t working anymore and the Who’s Viewed Me feature isn’t available anymore as well.  Well, for this feature, it’s probably because everyone decided to browse anonymously, thus defeating the purpose of the feature all together so maybe they decided to remove it.

Bottom line, if Friendster wants to serve its users better, they don’t really have to be this fully-loaded site that no one can use.  I’m not a big fan of fancy websites.  I’d go for a SIMPLE YET USABLE website anytime.  After all, I love Friendster because of its basic function of connecting people.  Over the past 2 years or so of having a Friendster account, I’ve indeed found A LOT of my friends from as far back as grade school!  How can I complain?!  I just feel that with all the pressure and the new hype about HTML/CSS, audio-video crap, Friendster is compromising their usability.  But you know what? We don’t need those!  How can you want that if there are stupid users who don’t seem to have any background on the color wheel, practically using the same colors for their background and fonts?!?!? LOLZ

Now if you’re thinking of refuting my views by saying “Friendster is free, so don’t complain!” – Well, so are Yahoo! and Google and a lot of other mainstream websites that are free yet usable.  And besides, I bet that these websites get more profits from sponsors/advertisers the more users (as in visitors, not just members) they have.  It’s just like watching free TV, you know.  But if they drive their visitors away, they’d also have to kiss the big bucks goodbye.