For Heath Tullier it only took one day to find his current girlfriend, once he started looking – online.
Tullier found his current girlfriend of eight and a half months through the www.friendster.com online service the first night he was on.
And Tullier is not the only one who thinks Friendster might be the best thing to happen to the Internet.
Friendster is uniting Internet junkies and casual users alike, all through a network of profiles and an easily searchable database of users’ tastes and interests.
The site connects users who are looking for potential dating relationships or just friends.
The site is based on a system of spider-web like connections. Once a user creates a profile he or she can add friends. Once users add someone as a friend, they are able to view friends of friends, and the connection continues to the fourth degree. Those who establish a valid connection can leave messages or view testimonials about the user. The more friends a user has the more profiles are available for him to view.
A friend of Tullier’s recommended the Web site to him as he was coming out of a bad relationship.
“I was just looking for somebody of the opposite sex to speak to and figured why not,” Tullier said. “I was not much into the whole Internet dating stuff.”
Tullier said he never expected to meet someone off the site, but Friendster proved him wrong.
“Out of curiosity I had tried some other dating site before Friendster, like Dreammates,” Tullier said. “I was just like wow everyone here really wants to get laid. You could go to a bar room and do the same thing. With Friendster, you get to actually know the person. It’s very safe because you are not handing out phone numbers and e-mails unless you want to. It is really genius in my opinion.”
Tullier was interested in his girlfriend after viewing some of the art she had loaded onto her profile. Tullier is a graphic artist who specializes in manipulating photographs. His interest was sparked by some of the unusual subjects she had chosen to depict, and he messaged her that night.
Tullier is not the only one benefitting from Friendster’s connection.
The site now boasts over one million users and has been mentioned in Abercrombie and Fitch’s Quarterly magazine and by Adam Brody on the O.C. televison series.
Candace Osborne, an interior design senior, known online as Pimpster, logged into Friendster to make friends when she moved in with her grandparents over the summer.
“I was in Vegas all summer and had like no friends,” Osborne said. “So that was my way of meeting people that had a common interest.”
Osborne said when she spent the summer in Vegas she was “heavy” into Friendster and other similar sites.
The sites have connected her with a plethora of friends including a few in high places.
Osborne now talks to Alex Greenwald, the lead singer of Phantom Planet regularly, whom she met on myspace.com. Her Friendster friends include musicians Howie Day and Gavin Degraw.
“Just because [Greenwald] is a celeb doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to do his Internet geek thing,” Osborne said. “It’s neat that you can interact with people you could consider celebrities that don’t see themselves that way.”
Sites like Friendster, such as www.myspace.com, www.the dilly.com, and www.campushook.com are all gaining momentum by connecting people for friends and dating safely and easily.
But Friendster itself might be losing some steam. The site has been plagued with user overload and recent policy problems.
According to an article on Wired News, the “Friendstapo,” as users call it, has recently been erasing members known as “fakesters.” Fakesters are users with deliberately fake personas – such as Britney Spears. The site is also heightening its photo policies in an attempt to keep people from using photos of famous people or anything else it deems out of line.
These problems are causing users to switch to their competitors. There are even rumors of the site moving to a new pay for service agreement.
Even Friendster junkie Osborne admits the site is declining.
“People have kind of stopped using it because it’s gotten slow,” Osborne said.
But for Tullier the site has done its job.
“I haven’t been on it in months,” Tullier said. “It’s kind of served its purpose.”