Not long ago I came across a movie based on Craig's List. Not to worry, the internet has not blinded some poor studio executive into making a Survivor: Craig's List. This is the stuff of Sundance and documentary. (Is reality TV just a popular form of documentary?) The people involved all make reference to the movie trying to capture the community that has built up around this web site, now focused on a number of large cities, and their sometimes odd interactions. I can remember when community was a buzz word. Maybe the buzz was right, albeit posthumously.

Around the same time as the social experiment on Craig's List was being recorded, I receive an email inviting me to join Friendster. "Friend X has invited you to join X's personal and private community at Friendster, where you and X can network with each other's friends. Friendster is an online community that connects people through networks of friends for dating or making new friends." I hit the delete key on that one pretty quick. I have more friends that I can reasonably give attention to, and do just the right amount of dating (none.) I did mention it to Doris, who strangely, had also been invited, by a different friend. Not long after, I was reading an article on how my email address book was soon to become the newest sales tool of some future work environment. For example, Deb in sales sees that I know Pat in ACME's eng. department, se asks for an introduction and my company is in the door making the sale. A little scary on the surface, and related to another article about an old social networking theory proposed by Stanley Milgram of Harvard, six degrees of separation. Seems an updated study is taking place using email at Columbia, called Small World. The study, indecently, is seen by some spam filters as a chain letter. I went looking for more, and in between references to a possible employment site based on this idea to the Kevin Bacon game (here is generic version of the original game), I found a grad student Danah Boyd doing research on Friendster and its implications as a tool to explicitly manifest and develop our personal social networks. Friendster is building a community based on people's consecutiveness, as implied by Milgram's study.

Friendster is defiantly hip, with its super growth rate, young demographic and media coverage outside the mainstream. As a Community, will it develop into something like the EBay of Dating (good for IPO), an online Burning Man (bad for IPO) or the next step in our evolution (what is an IPO)? Now if I just had the time to call my friend and request another email invite, I might find out.