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

Even with german actors i could't get more than 3...

cheers, Thomas

There are now 3238 people in my personal network, but only 3 from germany. :-(

cheers, Thomas

According to their database, the maximum is 8. I couldn't get above 2 (not that I really tried, though. Work does get in the way of this sort of thing!).

ermm. edward norton and vin diesel both get 9's. not from bacon. but they have someone who is nine from them.

Ditto. Yay for viral marketing, I guess. Y'all caught me in a state of boredom. Dang it... hurry up, laundry!

Blah. Might as well join in and see what happens

tman_friendster (at) trejan (dot) com

Someone tell me why it is that I want to sign up for this. I don't get it. I already dislike most of my friends' friends. Why should I expect this to be any different? Are there chat rooms? Or am I supposed to contact people one-on-one?

It's more than just meeting your friends' friends. Maybe there's a friend of one of your friends' friends that you'd get along with? Or for us single people, there might be someone 5 degrees away from us through one of our friends that we could start a relationship with. It's all about networking. If anything, it's neat to just see who you're connected to. <shrug>

There aren't any chat rooms, it's all testimonials, bulletin board postings and one-on-one conversations.

okay, so i signed up for this thing, so you guys better accept my friend's approval. darwin at clsfs.com

If anything, it's neat to just see who you're connected to.

Yeah. I thought it was neat, as well. Then I discovered that half the people I'm "connected" to in my area are links through "Los Angeles", which means, for all intents and purposes, once I hit that link, anything beyond is just a random stranger. Sort of defeats the purpose, IMHO.

Yeah, that's one part I don't like about it. I look over those kinds of connections unless it's something rare and/or a hobby of some sort.

Considering everybody in my list is from here and nobody is actually in the UK apart from me...

Then I discovered that half the people I'm "connected" to in my area are links through "Los Angeles", which means, for all intents and purposes, once I hit that link, anything beyond is just a random stranger. Sort of defeats the purpose, IMHO.

Try tribe.net for a better designed if lesser populated solution to the problem. (They've only been online for something like two months vs. a year for Friendster.) The tribe.net solution would be to have a "Los Angeles" tribe to which you could join yourself, but which wouldn't appear explicitly as a node in the friend graph.

Friendster, such as it is, still has some value, but it doesn't get really interesting until your friends start discovering you. My sister and a New York friend of mine separately "invited" me to join Friendster. Okay, sure, whatever. After I was there, several other friends "found" me there and added me in. Clicking on them, I was able to find one or two common friends and add them to my own list. And, so it went.

Friendster is a toy. tribe.net has the potential to be a fair bit more than just a toy. (A friend of mine is one of the founders of tribe.net, so I probably can't repeat all the grandiose plans he told me.)

Someone tell me why it is that I want to sign up for this. I don't get it. I already dislike most of my friends' friends.

LOL. The only use I can thing for it is to rid my life of all those Sobig bounce messages.

OK, just for a lark, I've joined both friendster and tribe.net. Feel free to add me to your networks.... I'm julf at julf dot com

i'm now in tribe.net, too...
speedy67 at gmx dot de

cheers, Thomas

Well I just got on friendster... waterman981 at hotmail dot com. Everyone add me!

another one
at least, appears to be
i havent checked it out. got invited today. decided, no
http://www.ringo.com/

Got a 4.

http://oracleofbacon.org/cgi-bin/oracle/movielinks?firstname=Bacon%2C+Kevin&game=1&secondname=Sefton+Daly

!