Poking Friendster goodbye | Part 2: The end of an era

The end of Friendster signals the end of an era. Its end gives us a hint of what real-life is. It is embellished with change as the only thing consistent this journey that we call life. It is the end of an era because it signals the end of some notable things that I believe I am not alone when it comes to encounter that I had back when I was still active there.

The end of Friendster signals the end of recognizing the sanctity of testimonials we used to carefully think about the things we'd write on our friends' profile and moreover, thought carefully about the kind of testimonials we'd accept from our friends' and then treasure then as testaments of the person that we want ourselves to believe in.

The end of Friendster signals the end of choosing carefully what photos can be uploaded in our profiles because early on it only allows 5 pictures that will not exceed 1MB in size.

The end of Friendster is the end of crash-courses on HTML and CSS because we all wanted our profiles to speak about us, our values, our hobbies interests and whatnot. It ended when the customized functions of our profiles was abused by individuals with little HTML experience, a very large proportion of pages do not satisfy the criteria for valid HTML or CSS thus we ended with poorly formatted code can cause accessibility problems for those using software such as screen readers.

The end of Friendster signals an end of an era, for veteran internet users and social networkers who've leapfrogged from Friendster to Multiply to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter.

Friendster worked well as a prototype and a laboratory for functions of those things that would make later social networks better than Friendster.

The end of Friendster is but a staggering reminder to not forget the things that we value, to not forget to think about what we put in our profiles or what we share with people in a social network that we consider as friends. It’s end reminds us of the importance of being mindful and of the value of scrutiny and self-studying be it for HTML codes or for approving comments or selecting pictures. Friendster’s end reminds us to re-claim those things which have been long forgotten in this Facebook society of careless status messages and senseless uploads and tags of notes and drunken images of ourselves.