I know there are a few here signed up, but who else?
I signed up a few days ago I've got to say I like it.
I only have one friend, but that put 6,676 people in my Personal Network. Not that it'll do me any good.

Yeah I signed up a while ago. I have 12 friends and 42,824 people.

damien at punched dot us if anyone wants to add me :P

I've been playing with Friendster for a while now, mostly because two separate friends of mine sucked me into it. I've added 12 friends and my "personal network" has some 211296 people in it. I feel so connected to the universe. Probably the most entertaining thing is when you click on some random person and Friendster gives you several disjoint paths from you to them.

One of the weird things about Friendster is that there are a bunch of virtual things in there that you can be friends with (cities, schools, etc.). I suppose somebody here should create the "empeg" person if we want to keep up with the geekiness.

if we want to keep up with the geekiness.

Yes, because we're dangerously short on geekiness around here.

One thing I'm curious about is... if you don't want to pester anyone into signing up with you, how do you go about looking to see if there's anyone you know already signed up that you can add as a friend, when it'll only show you your friends?

Oh, and anyone connected to Kevin Bacon, yet?

You can search for first and last name, or you can search for somebody's e-mail address. If that person is "in your network" (reachable in the friend-graph using less than some number of hops, I presume), then you can click on the resulting links to verify you've got the right person. If they're not reachable from you, you can't click to verify, but you can blindly invite them to be your friend.

It's clunky, but that's the general idea.

Interesting...

I just signed up - dolebomo at yahoo. Feel free to add me, I am currious what the invite looks like.

i added a random person. invited rather. they accepted. and have never shown up in my personal network or whatever. its still empty. that was like a week ago
customsex at hotmail dot com

OK. I'll try this thing out.

rob [at] spmicro [dot] com

Okay, I've invited all of you to be my friends. Viral marketing at its finest.

Oh, forgot to mention: donato.AT.sinicco.org if anyone wants to add me.

Oh, and anyone connected to Kevin Bacon, yet?

I did a search for Kevin Bacon and it came up with maybe 30 people, most of whom have the actor's photo as their own. I seem to be "connected" to eight of them. Some of the connections seem more tenuous than others, e.g.:

You <-> Erik <-> Gay Agenda <-> Jesus <-> Kevin

So, there you go. My possible connection to Kevin Bacon. Unfortunately, if I click on "Jesus", it says "Account Unavailable". Maybe he'll be coming back later.

I have asked Kevin to be my friend

I'd bet my life on it...

Maybe he'll be coming back later.

<Bart> If there's a bad resurrection joke, I haven't heard it! </Bart>

Oh well, I'll give it a go.

jim<at>helekar.net

While we're talking about Friendster, some of you may find tribe.net to be interesting as well. Where Friendster only has a notion of people, thus forcing people to create "fakesters" around which they can group themselves, tribe.net has an explicit notion of tribes. We could, for example, create an empeg tribe, and we'd automatically get a message board, notification service, and other features around the empeg tribe.

Okay, I'm giving into the peer pressure. tonycpsu (at) yahoo (dot) com

We could, for example, create an empeg tribe, and we'd automatically get a message board, notification service, and other features around the empeg tribe.

Kinda sounds like what we already get on the BBS.

Seriously though, tribenet does look like a much better concept... The hart part is getting everyone to join one of these little community deals. My friends are lazy and will expect me to just call them... Trying to impress upon them the coolness and usefulness of something like Friendster is hard to do... But Friendster does seem to be gaining some popularity, at least in our geekish circles.

Yeah, I've actually been signed up there since the 1st. I like the interface, but there really aren't that many people signed up. I created an Empeg Owners tribe but the site crapped out when it got created and now it's all screwed up (that's bad coding there). I've sent an email to see if they can correct it.

Just signed up and invited all from this thread. :-)

But please explain, what's the "Kevin Bacon" thing?

cheers, Thomas

The assigning of Bacon numbers to actors. Mathematicians have an Erdos number.

http://oracleofbacon.org/oracle/index.html

I just tried ten or twelve actors/actresses and couldn't get a Bacon Number higher than 2. Seems to me the use of really obscure actors and actresses makes it much easier to find shorter paths... When I've played this game most people need at least 4 or 5 hops.

Woohoo, using Charlie Chaplin I finally got a Bacon Number of 3.

I just tried ten or twelve actors/actresses and couldn't get a Bacon Number higher than 2.

One game which can be fun to try is to make a "Bacon loop". Pick any actor/actress, and try, using the standard rule, to make a loop that ends back at that actor/actress, without any repeats (film or actor). Longest loop wins.

I've heard it more commonly referred to as "six degrees of Kevin Bacon." I'm guessing that someone was watching a Kevin Bacon movie one day, and decided to use him as a model for this movie trivia game, it just stuck, and became a nation-wide thing. In fact, Kevin himself appeared in a Visa commercial spoofing the idea.

*edit*
I was pretty close
Here's the book

Yeah, it's scary. The harder you try to find a high number, the more surprised you get. I tried Fred Schneider (as in the guy in the band the B-52's... I thought he'd never even been in any films) and he had a 2.

Apparently the book is wrong about Julia Louis-Dreyfus needing all six degrees according to oracle of bacon. Of course the book was written 4 years before "hollow man" so you can't really blame it.

While look at the Bacon site again I came across a very strange site. The "Female Celebrity Smoking List", a site which catalogues which actresses smoke in which movies. Too strange, somebody is oddly obscessed...

http://smokingsides.com/asfs/

Funny, if you reverse the two, it finds a different path...

Yeah, I noticed that too. Plus, they were the first to do the game. They didn't have the benefit of a UVA IMDb database-driven Bacon oracle