In its ongoing campaign of cluttering itself up with new and useless features, Friendster recently added a "Who's Viewed Me" page, allowing its users to see which other Friendster users have been viewing their profiles. This is something that would appeal to only the most self-loathing megalomaniacs among us. Needless to say, I can't stop checking it.
But Friendster is having some trouble with this. You see, the introduction of the feature came along with a new "View Profiles Anonymously" option, allowing user to surreptitiously view other people's profiles without the viewees ever knowing. This is in place so people can stalk their ex-lovers cloaked in the familiar anonymity of the Internet. However, since there really isn't anything to gain by intentionally allowing others to know that you're looking at them, I'm sure a lot of people, including me, turned on the anonymity function, just because it seemed like the ninja thing to do.
But Friendster got wise to that one, my friends. Now, if you have anonymity turned on, Who's Viewed Me is disabled. No one-way mirrors. If you want to see who's looking at you, you've got to let others see you looking at them. I'm sure this has paralyzed the minds of many a Friendster user, pitting voyeurism against anonymity, creating a battle between the Internet's two greatest contributions to human interaction. This has all the makings of a bona fide Internet disaster.
But at least they took the goddamn birthday cupcakes off the front page.
not that blog comments are the way to have meaningful discussion, but, do you find social networking websites to be at all useful, interesting, or entertaining? because i'm totally not sold. i must be missing something.