Jesus Christ invited Liz to be part of his network of friends at Tribe, another social networking site similar to Friendster. This seems like an obvious strategy for online evangelists, but it reminds me of all the fictional friendsters I’ve been acquiring recently. When I first saw Sean Connery, Conan the Barbarian and Professor Snape and even Heidegger had Friendster profiles I thought it was just people fooling around, bending the system. Cool, I figured, and added Conan as my friend for old times’ sakes. Once added, I was amazed to find that my social network had expanded exponentially. Friendster only lets you see your friends and their friends and their friends again, up to four degrees, I think, so there are always lots of members of Friendster who aren’t visible to you. With Conan as my friend, I could suddenly see twice as many members in Norway, for instance: friends of Conan’s friends’ friends, you see. I even found one of my students from last year at the Friendster site after having become friends with Conan.

At The Tribe they do the “we have shared interests” thing more explicitly, by allowing people to join tribes. Unfortunately, since anyone can start a tribe, most tribes only have one member, so the point kind of self-destructs. I think I prefer the way Friendster users have hacked their system: after all, any friend of Conan the Barbarian’s is a friend of m…uh…well, you get my point 😉