The Day That Friendster Ruined Our Lives

I remember when I first heard about friendster.com. It seemed like a boring concept to me—that I could make up a personal profile complete with photos, a list of my hobbies etc and then my friends could link to me. Why would I need such a service when I had email for keeping in touch. But then it became kind of fun—if you had 30 first degree friends, you might have 2000 second degree friends and a zillion third degree friends. That seemed sort of interesting so I kept my profile.

As the months went by, Friendster hit the big time and it seemed that you could find almost anyone on Friendster. A quick search could yield long lost childhood friends, distant relatives and once in awhile you might even get a decent date out of it. Then of course, there were the other uses for Friendster that were rarely spoken of. You could secretly examine an ex’s profile for clues to her new life. Did she look happy in her photos? So soon, you might wonder. Did she have flirty testimonials from new people? Who the hell were they? Did she…lord forbid…suddenly change her status to “in a relationship”?

Or maybe there were people out there who had absolutely enchanted you in your one brief encounter. They too could be tracked. What kind of movies did they like, how old were they, did they like ice skating and eating celery with raisins just like you? Were they even single? Yep, you could check that through good old Friendster. And check and check and check, we did.

And then one day the world came crashing down.

Owfice Burn sent me a text message that said, “Friendster emergency.”

“Owfice Burn,” I said when I called her. “What is it?”

“On Friendster now, you can see who has been looking at your profile which means that all of the people you’ve been looking at can see what you’ve been doing.”

“Not funny,” I told her.

And so she urged me to log on to Friendster and sure enough, I could see a row of images of people who had been looking at me. That’s when I began to scream.

And as we called our friends, this scenario repeated itself. “Not funny,” they would say and then upon seeing the proof, they too would begin screaming. And soon enough, we were all screaming—all over the five boroughs, New York State, the Northeast, the South, Midwest and West Coast—we...were...howling. Our stalking, lurking, impulsive, compulsive searching ways were on naked display for our most sacred and secret loves to see.

We had been ruined.

And to this day, when I even hint at that awful day when we were shamed in the eyes of our unrequited loves, the response is always universal.

Said one woman, “Ah yes, it was the shot heard round the world.”

Said another who had gathered that night at Brooklyn bar Cattyshack to hold vigil, “It was like mayhem at Catty because everyone was stressed about eventually running into the randoms they’d been stalking.”

And all Office Tan can do at this point is file a class action lawsuit on behalf of all of us for pain and suffering and of course, the astronomical costs of hiring a search firm to help locate our collective missing dignity.