Yes, Friendster is back

by Art Samaniego, MB

This week, the internet was abuzz with talks about the return of once the most favorite social media platform of many Filipinos — Friendster.

Many immediately noticed, including me, that it’s not the original Friendster because it’s using a .click and not the .com domain. My first reaction upon knowing it from my friend Azrael Coladilla was to warn my friends, but after thoroughly checking the site with inputs from Rodel Plasabas of the DICT, I found NO evidence of phishing or scamming. Still, many were not convinced and accused the site of doing illegal online activities, even telling people to stay away from www.friendster.click because a supporter of the Philippine president Bongbong Marcos shared it.

The new Friendster is a fan site of the original Friendster of 2003. Running on the WordPress platform and using BuddyPress plugin, it never claimed to be a part of or affiliated with the original social networking site.

I sent a message to the admin of the page and found out that the owner is Bram Gumilang from Indonesia. A web developer who used to work in IT industry and now builds houses and designs surfboards. 

I found Bram easy to talk with and straightforward when I asked him about Friendster. click. Here’s what we talked about:

Art: Why did you create the “new’ Friendster?

Bram: Friendster always has that kind of nostalgic and sentimental value to me.

Around 2005/2006, when Friendster started implementing its CSS customization feature, I got heavily involved in Friendster-related groups and communities. In 2006 I launched the website Friendster -layouts.com and a community forum friendstertalk.com, which had quite an active userbase until Friendster started losing it’s traction in the social media world. 

So last year when I had a bit of free time I decided to start friendster.click and build it with free/open source platform, because why not. It’s fun to build something, even more fun to see that people are also having fun with it.

Art: What data are you collecting and how will you protect these data?

Bram: Basically the same kind of data collected by websites like facebook, twitter, etc. in order for these kind of sites to operate, but in a much smaller scale. More about this can be read in the site’s privacy policy page.

I’m not a security expert, but I do what any web administrator does to protect websites and databases from intruders, including making sure the web server secure and the systems up to date.

Friendster.click database doesn’t store any sensitive financial information (we don’t ask users to fill in their bank or credit card information or anything like that).

Passwords are stored not in plain text but encrypted with certain hash (that kind of one way encryption is pretty standard in modern web these days), so even if someone has access to the database, the person can never decrypt it. 

Bram, the developer and owner of Friendster.click

Art: Are you planning to sell the data that you have collected?

Bram: No. When the data is stuff like aB0uT mE, zodiac, favorite music, etc., the possibility/value of selling it is not substantial enough that makes it worth ruining your reputation as a web admin.

Art: Many people with no security background claim that the site is collecting data that could be used for phishing attacks. What can you say about this?

Bram: Just like any other site, by default, the site collects data. Browser information, geolocation, cookies, those kind of stuff. For other data that is more specific in nature (including email address, comments, personal information, etc.) it’s up to the users, the way they engage with the site, and how much they want to share about themselves.

I’ve never done any phishing for my personal/financial gain, not at Friendster.click or other sites I manage. I never created a website with that kind of intention.

Art: What do you want to tell the people who accused you of using Friendster to scam users?

Bram: While having a certain resemblance to the original Friendster, it’s quite obvious that the site is fan-made. The site is definitely not being used to run a scam operation, financial fraud, or anything like that.

Art: The site is now becoming popular. What are your future plans for this?

Bram: I have yet to make any future plans for this.

Art: Are you planning to make Friendster.click a complete social media network? Will your future moves include giving Friendster its old glory?

Bram: As long as the site can stay online and grow within a reasonable scale, that would be good enough.

Art: People criticizing your site are concerned about security. Can you assure them that data will be secure and safe?

Bram: No one can actually assure anyone 100% security and safety. Even websites run by corporations and governments can be hacked.

Never post any sensitive/financial information online. No one can steal from you if you don’t make valuable/important data accessible to begin with.

Art: Do you have any message to Friendster.click users?

Bram: I just wanna say thank you for the support and the enthusiasm. It’s a pleasure to see you all around, having fun, making connections, showing off the background pictures and music/video on your profiles, and so on. Let’s keep the Friendster experiences and memories alive.

Art: Thank you, Bram, and I hope to connect with you at Friendster.click.

Bram: Thank you Art.

I checked Friendster.click and it never claimed or pretended to be the Friendster of 2003. It is obviously a fan site that aims to give a nostalgic experience to the former users of the real Friendster. Is Friendster back? Yes, it is back because it never left the hearts of every user. It may not be the real Friendster that we used to love, but it makes us feel again the connection it created among the millions of users all over the world.

So what are you waiting for? Go check www.friendster.click and get those testimonials from friends that we all missed.

Rest In Peace!

My column in Mindanao Daily News and BusinessWeek Mindanao

OPINION

By KLAUS DORING

 September 27, 2021

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Years ago, I was still a freshman, when it came to the Internet and blogging. When I started my first blog as a German expatriate living in the Philippines, a very special social network came across my path: Facebook! I started chatting with some media friends from all over the Philippines.

 

Actually I started with "Friendster". Friends from the whole globe! Facebook was introduced to me as a new site for college kids.

 

Nowadays, we're experiencing different headlines, when it comes to social media networks. Despite scandals over fake news and data privacy, one thing is for sure: the social network Facebook is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

 

Actually, during the first year, I found Facebook’s evolution and societal function both equally fascinating and disturbing.

 

The biggest question of all that gnaws at the back of my mind is whether there is any stopping Facebook in the future?  It looks increasingly like the answer is no.

 

“Friendster failed for simple reasons: the time wasn’t right,” says Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Not only is it about the readiness of people to participate in a social networking site, but it’s also just about the nuts and bolts.” Friendster and MySpace helped blaze the trail for Facebook's global popularity, but they failed to achieve even close to the same success as their successor.

 

The kind of engineering that allows Facebook to function every day simply wasn’t available back in the early days of the new millennium. But by 2004, internet speeds had increased and the coding that underpins websites had become more sophisticated. The technical limitations of earlier social networking sites like Friendster and Friends Reunited cleared the runway for Facebook.

 

But despite technical barriers, those other sites paved the way for Facebook at a time when people were still a little wary of putting too much of themselves out on the internet. In the 1990s, internet users were warned against even sharing their first name online, but now words like “oversharing” and “selfie” are so common they are recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

Facebook - bone or ban? Fact is, Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider. I am on Twitter and LinkedIn. But bear with me, most of the time, I spend being online on Facebook.

 

Once the mid-2000s rolled around, Facebook was also able to hire a lot of talented engineers from Silicon Valley, which helped it put together the kind of website infrastructure that could scale-up with an exponentially growing user base. Your Newsfeed doesn’t curate and customise itself – its launch needed engineers to cook up algorithms that picked the most valuable updates from your friends’ updates.

 

But Hwang points to another serendipitous factor in Facebook’s global rise: mobile phones. In a lot of developing countries, people only have cheap mobiles to access the internet. In fact, a lot of these users think Facebook is the internet.

 

“We can’t discount the power of mobile,” says Hwang. It’s made “social networks much, much more pervasive. You have social media at all times in your pocket, which makes it this powerful platform for news and conversation that operated in a slower way in the desktop-only era.”

 

For starters, it has become so ingrained and intertwined in the digital ecosystem of the 21st Century that it is hard to now untangle it. Oxford’s Hogan points to a concept he calls “interoperability.” This is where a Facebook login is often required to use and operate other online services.

 

“Just today I went out to buy concert tickets,” Hogan says. “I had to log into Facebook. I don’t use Facebook, but I had to dust off my login. Facebook is becoming that de facto, online identity provider.” I am sure you experienced the same, my dear readers.

 

Facebook also taps into basic human needs, according to psychologists. Even with social media movements like #DeleteFacebook, mass privacy concerns or even just calls to leave the site on the back of pedestrian design tweaks, people just can’t stay away.

 

“Almost everybody comes back,” says Catalina Toma, associate professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin. “Social networking sites tap into what makes us human: we like to connect with others.” Yes, we don't go out and meet friends somewhere for a chat or a beer or coffee. We are connected with them via Facebook. Especially since the pandemic didn't allow us to go out and meet people personally.

 

But there are tangible benefits beyond those that keep people hooked.

 

“Lots of studies show the more people use Facebook, the more social capital they derive – resources that we get from just being connected to other people,” says Toma. “There’s emotional support, asking for advice, asking for recommendations.”

 

For many Facebook users, the pros outweigh the cons: tracking down long-lost friends, getting leads to a job, expanding their business. They can deal with the glamorized glimpses. All this keeps people coming back for more, despite the onslaught of what Toma calls “glamorized glimpses”. These are the carefully curated peeks into the lives of everyone else, who all seem to be doing better than you. “They feel worse, but they cannot stop,” Toma says. I strongly have to agree!

 

Facebook is bound to have a grip on our lives. “Social media companies seek to exploit one’s attention for profit,” Hogan says. “It’s not even ambiguous. It’s exactly what Zuckerberg said in Congress: ‘Where do you get your money?’ ‘We get it from ads.’”

 

Right place, right time: the rise of internet-connected mobile devices in turn fueled the rise of Facebook.

 

“Facebook’s business is still going to accelerate,” says Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University who wrote The Big Four, a book about how powerful a tiny handful of technology companies are becoming. “Consumers talk a big game but where is the first place they go to express their rage? Facebook and Instagram. And with 2.2 billion monthly active users, advertisers have no choice but to be on Facebook.” That could change, though, as advertising dollars follow young users who abandon the platform.

 

Still, there’s plenty of stability with older people – even among senior citizens. The site’s true future could boil down to what world governments decide to do, if anything, about Facebook’s growing influence.

 

“I don’t think the question is [what is] ‘killing Facebook’,” says Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I think the question is what would get people to an appropriate use of Facebook. To the extent that we ‘knew’ about it before, we found ways to put it out of mind. Now, we can no longer do this.” We’re now all too familiar with the dangers of data leaks and fake news.

 

Let's face it: there’s also the simple fact that Facebook has a monopoly. “Facebook’s sheer size and cash on hand means that they can either acquire or effectively shut down any competition,” says Galloway, pointing to examples like WhatsApp and Instagram, which were eventually absorbed into the Facebook behemoth.

 

For now, Facebook is still so entrenched in our daily lives, there’s not going to be an immediate escape.“What’s more likely to happen is that people start to realize the markets and economy might be better off – by stimulating innovation, creating new jobs – if we were to break it up and have multiple firms instead of just one,” Galloway says. That’s the more likely outcome than Facebook just crashing, burning and disappearing altogether, according to the experts.

 

Rest in peace, Facebook? Surely a big NO!