Friendster - Connecting People
January 17, 2008 by dryxanne
You know, Friendster does really connecting people.
Maybe in a sense that through Friendster, some people come to know each other, or hate each other, and some other people come to know that one’s friend/relative/boyfriend/girlfriend/exes is one’s current friend/far-related relative/exes/whatever.
Like what I just realized few minutes ago, when I was browsing randomly, I found out that one of my exes’s current girlfriend, is a friend of a friend (call him A) of my friend (B), so this girl is a 3rd Degree connected with me. Quite far, right? Well, not really, because her friend, the A guy, met me in December, when I was hanging out with B, and B introduced us. Well, the introduction was because of courtesy, naturally, but I somehow still remember this A guy’s name. Quite weird, because I met some of B’s friends, got introduced casually, but never remembered their names.
So, just now when I saw this A guy actually commented on this girl’s Friendster, comment that can be clearly seen as old friend’s comment, I was quite surprised.
Not weird enough?
What if I told you that this B is not just casual friend? That B is related to another guy whom I’m seeing, whom I’ve been seeing for the last 17 months? That their relation is not just casual relation but they are siblings? A guy that you might instantly think as my boyfriend if you happen to meet us out in some dates, although both of us for certain reasons still put "It’s Complicated" in our status (after all, what’s a Friendster status anyway? - once said THE girl’s current boyfriend, my ex that is).
Well, by this point, you might think that I wasn’t randomly browsing. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I WAS. That’s none of your business. Either way, I’m sure that one day I will come to this event anyway.
This is just one sample. I remember I once read that there were several post-graduate students in US that did some researches in people’s relations. They came to a conclusion, thus became their post-graduate thesis, that anyone in this world, is related somehow to another person in this world, that if you trace this person’s friends/acquaintances, he/she is actually connected by less than 5 (or 6, I can’t remember clearly) people in between.
That means, put me as a girl #1, and randomly pick another person, anywhere in the world, then according to this theory, this person is connected to me, and there’s just like 5 (or 6) persons in the link between us. I tend to believe that this theory perhaps is almost true, and Friendster is just one way to prove it. Although, so far my list of friends has been just around Indonesia, perhaps one day we’ll find it true enough to other people around the globe.
