Friendster rant

Holy fuck people.

I don’t normally use Friendster very often (the Americans and some of us Malaysians use MySpace), updating my profile on the rarest occasion (I still have my Chemistry-bashing article put up), approving testimonials, and reading messages received.

Yes, this is a Friendster rant. The only reason I joined was to meet up again with old friends and see how they’re getting on with their lives (never happened, of course, we merely added each other, exchanged testimonials and that’s about it). And the only time I was pleasantly surprised was how a junior who flew to Ireland to further his medical studies (fuyoh), added me on Friendster - he missed his Malaysian friends, and I can only imagine so.

What other reasons do I have for joining this seemingly sorry excuse for an ‘online community’ or ‘find your old friends!’ or ‘put up horribly-drawn ASCII art and mass-send them as testimonials’ website?

Because everyone else has a Friendster! We must participate in activities that everyone does en masse! Can’t feel left out, can we?

I would love to link to the worst profile I’ve ever seen in my healthy 18 years of life, but since most of you would know this particular person, whether close or otherwise, I’ll refrain from doing so and give him what dignity he has left.

Here’s an extract of his retina-mutilating profile (I stress on extract, because if I were to copy and paste the entire thing I do not want to bear your medical expenses):

~$eNc3 oF sTyLe~w3ll i’M m0r3 oN He h!p-HoP bU I @L$0 Go 4 $oMe FuNkY 0uTf!+ N s0m3 !m3 Ju$ M@k3 Ev3rY+H!nG s!mPl3….

_{s3nCe Of Ta$+3} oK i Ju$+ DoN+ H@v3 AnY p@rTiCuLaR f00d HA I hAv3 !n m!nD…..I jUs+ EaT wHaTeVeR i HaV3…

_{$eNc3 Of $iGhT} i l!K3 HiNgS 2 B fUnKy N Ey3-CaTcHiNg….Ev3n ! CoM3 T0 GaL bT $oM3h0W My Ey3s jUsT g0+ CaUgH+ 2 1 p3r$oN…

_{s3nCe oF s0uNd} ! gUesS i @m m0r3 2 H3 pUnK-r0cK!nG, He@d-Kn0cKiNg sOnGs, bU cUrReN+Ly i jUsT FaLL !n L0v3 w!Th +Ho$e MuSiC Wi+H mOrE s0F+-!n$+RuMenTaL s0uNd !n iT…

What the fuck is wrong with you, oh great junior acquaintance? I am sure you took three million seconds of your life to type out phrases made out of irregularly capitalised letters and colourful punctuations that, while still understandable, are horribly destructing to my eyes. That, and you have an overtly colourful background of some punk band that totally rape my eyes.

If you have some sense of style as you so claim, why do you put up several shoddily-designed animated pictures? Why do you make my browser stop functioning for several precious seconds when you embed horrible video clips into your profile and force my computer to suck needed bandwidth to load your videos of distate? Use youtube.com instead!

I am as equally annoyed when people keep sending forwarded messages into my Friendster account; I have rarely read a forwarded message in my life (either my e-mail or Friendster, it doesn’t matter) and deleted them on sight. Send something more personalised and I am more like to read it.

I am not against the use of Friendster (doh, when I’m already using it, since I do admit one may find it useful occasionally), but if you can barely design your own profile, stop putting up videos that take three years to load on my already-dying PC and other eye-raping background images. Like, use some intellect and taste dammit!

Of course it’s fun to view pics of other people, but embedded videos (not YouTube) get on my nerves.