The trend of friendster’s testimonial
Almost everyone owns a friendster account especially in Asia. I had it since end of 2003. Let’s count it’s almost 4 years already. Until today, my testimonials and comments has only reach 200 compare to some people who just created the account for less than half years but the comments has reached 500 over. While some people has below than 100.
At first, it was named ‘testimonial’. If you search it on answers.com under dictionary, you will find that testimonial means ‘A written affirmation of another’s character or worth; a personal recommendation’. So, yes, during my first and second year of using friendster, I did get testimonials from my friends that described about myself and I, their impression, how did we know each other, and so on. At that time, testimonial still sticks at its own meaning. Let’s ignore those I-consider-as-spam-testimonial which says,”Hi, nice to know you. Can I have your msn?” or “Hi, stay pretty. Take care.” those kind of things. Then, people kept asking each other to write testimonial. Besides collecting friends, people is competing in collecting testimonials too.
As friendster grows and gets older, people tend to get bore of writing testimonial that describe someone’s character. That’s what I think. You see, you have those friends in your friends’ list for more than one year, you can’t be kept on repeating and describing his/her personality. That’s when it changes the fuction into a chat box where people asking each others news, sometimes share their story, or a very short message “*hugs* i miss u bitch” kind of thing. The work flow is like this: I write in my friend testi, she reply on mine, I write on hers, she reply on mine and so on. So, one day you can get at least 10 testimonials/comments. Yes, somehow, I am part of those people who do that thing. =P So miserable we have forgotten that there is a feature called message in friendster or msn.
Besides that, another ‘in’ thing is the glitter/picture/flash testimonials with songs which is so damn annoying. The music plays by itself when you open someone’s profile. Testimonial itself has changed name to comment. Well, friendster itself is a phenomenon in internet world. It’s interesting to see the trend and how people use friendster.
