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Suicide Machine Can Kill Your Web 2.0 Life, Forever

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

Be honest, is your social networking and web 2.0 life already impacting your real life so much that maybe it’s time for you to consider killing it off? Apparently that was what SuicideMachine.org allows you to do.

This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.

SuicideMachine currently works with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. The service it offers is so controversial that Facebook hits back and banned SuicideMachine’s IP Address, preventing what could possibly a massive suicide committed by its members.

I couldn’t blame Facebook from doing so. SuicideMachine is “so dangerous” in the sense that once you sign-up for it and allows it to delete your social networking profiles, it will forever ban you from joining those sites again. So, SuicideMachine is not really for those who are momentarily disgruntled by their social networking activities. Not for those who are just experiencing momentary social networking stress. Like they say, once you start the process on the Suicide Machine, you can’t stop it anymore.

And I would really think twice before signing up to SuicideMachine, after all, despite the procastination effect of Facebook and Twitter, I still find these social networking/web 2.0 services of pretty good use.

Committing web 2.0 suicide has never occured in my mind, at least not yet.

Friendster Rolls Out New Design, Prepping Up for Sell Out?

Flashback to 2002, there were no Facebook or Twitter yet. Then came a social networking site called Friendster. In no time at all, Friendster became a big hit. Ask any Asian Facebook users today if they’ve used Friendster and they will most likely answer in unison – that Friendster was their first taste of social networking.

Today, Friendster has lost its luster, thanks to Facebook and Myspace. Probably more than half of Friendster accounts have already been closed or deleted and the users are all on Facebook now. Are all hopes lost for what used to be Asia’s top social network? Enter a new Friendster – sporting a new look and perhaps better features. [Read more…]

Friendster launches all-new blogs and forums

Friendster, Inc. announced that the all-new Friendster Blogs and Forums are now available to Friendster’s over 90 million members worldwide. Both products have been enhanced with new features and redesigned.

The newly enhanced Friendster Blogs, built on WordPress, enable members of the Friendster community to quickly and easily create a personal blog. Each blog can be customized with themes and skins available on Friendster, and thousands more available across the web, or users can create their own style, colors, fonts and page layout using common HTML and CSS web languages. Friendster users can also add a variety of widgets and a personalized badge for their blog right from the design tab of every Friendster blog. Users can also embed into their blog photos directly from their Friendster photo albums and videos from popular video sites such as YouTube.

Friendster’s new Forums allow Friendster users to participate in discussions within a variety of categories including music, sports, lifestyle, celebrities, TV, fashion, health, religion, food, dating, finance and more. Users can join a current discussion or start a new one under a specified category. Posts are organized under each category by most recent. Each post is time stamped and includes a thumbnail photo linked to the Friendster profile of the user, so users can easily meet others in a discussion.

Friendster receives patent on compatibility scoring of online social networj users

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Friendster a new patent entitled “Cpmpatibility Scoring of Users in a Social Network (U.S. Patent No. 7,451,161).

The latest patent describes a unique methodology used to calculate compatibility based on expressed interests between users of a social network. This includes scoring the compatibility between two members of a social network based on their interests and scoring the correlation between two interests for a given member of a social network.

Prior to this most recent fourth patent, Friendster was granted three social networking patents in 2006 and 2007:

In July 2006, Friendster was awarded its first U.S. patent describing how people are connected in the context of an online social network, titled “A System, Method and Apparatus for Connecting Users in an Online Computer System Based on Their Relationships within Social Networks” (U.S. Patent No. 7,069,308).

Friendster was granted a second U.S. patent in October 2006, which discloses the process of enriching other users’ profiles with text, video, pictures and additional content, titled “Method of Inducing Content Uploads in a Social Network” (U.S. Patent No. 7,117,254).

In March 2007, Friendster added another patent to its portfolio, titled “System and Method for Managing Connections in an Online Social Network” (U.S. Patent No. 7,188,153 B2), which describes a technology that allows members of a social network to manage their connections by, for example, adding friends; personalizing their network through arranging, ordering and classifying connections made in an online community; and managing these connections at will.

Friendster supports apps from Facebook

Friendster, Inc. has deployed support for the Facebook Platform on Friendster Developer Program. Tens of thousands of developers can now introduce the applications and features they’ve built on the Facebook Platform to Friendster’s 80 million users around the world. Friendster is the first major social network and social website of any kind to deploy both the OpenSocial and Facebook de facto industry standards for the benefit of Friendster users and the developer community.

Friendster to launch mobile text alerts in Asia

Friendster, Inc. announced that its users in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines will soon be able to subscribe to Friendster Text Alerts, a full suite of alerts covering activity in their Friendster network, sent directly to their mobile devices via SMS text messages. Friendster Text Alerts is Friendster’s second mobile offering and complements its mobile site, m.friendster.com, launched in May 2008.

Friendster users can subscribe to receive text message alerts for friend requests, new messages, comments, bulletins and more. When such activity takes place within their network of friends on Friendster, they will receive an SMS text message on their mobile phone. Users will also be able to share and communicate by sending a text message to Friendster to update content on their profile, such as shoutouts and bulletins, send messages, and reply to friend requests.