New YouTube Subscriber

I recently gained a new YouTube subscriber, so I just made a quick update of my friend count to 33.

New Friend: Paula Fuga

Wow, this is really cool. Paula Fuga has accepted my friend request on MySpace. I saw her perform at the last poetry slam, and she is also a well-respect musician here in Hawaii. She has an incredible voice. Take some time to listen to her music if you like Reggae, Hawaiian, or R&B. She also has a song on her MySpace page that was a collaboration with Jack Johnson.

SuperDeluxe

Super Deluxe is an artsy online comedy community that I found about about from one of my Google Alerts - I happen to be googlestalking film director Michel Gondry (I'm a huge fan, and it is a great way to find out about his project developments), and one came up about a video spoof of him. If you watch the spoof, all the jokes are extremely Michel Gondry oriented, so if you are not a fan you might think it is incredibly random. It was created by a group called Olde English and is posted on the site Super Deluxe. I've only just seen the video, but by all accounts, this looks like it might be a good place to trawl for new relevant friends (see my criteria in an earlier post).

Creating a Friendster Profile

Well, there are more important things I should be doing now, but I decided to complete my next goal for 1000 Friends, creating a Friendster profile.

Creating a profile was the standard rigmarole - and the site is set up to handle any country, any state/province, and any city - theoretically. When I picked my country, the state/province field was automatically populated with the 50 states and the various territories and military outposts. Great, that's nice and convenient. When I picked my state - Hawaii - the city field populated. Awesome, right? Well, there was no Kapolei, which is a bona fide city, not some shack on the beach that proudly owns a place name. There were neighborhood subdivisions listed (Makakilo for instance), but no Kapolei. So I choose Honolulu instead.

Later I decided to upload some photos, you know, to plug something in as a profile icon - and uploaded three, one of which was a photo of myself that I doctored to look like my eyes pointed in opposite directions (just for fun). Well, that photo got stuck being the profile photo! I tried moving it, I tried reassigning the "primary photo" but so far no luck.

Eventually I got bored with the site, and actually clicked on an ad titled "Who would be your celebrity cellmate?" and featuring Paris Hilton. Oh the shame.

First New Friend (Pownce)

My first new friend came through Pownce, Vernon Browne, the host of 808Talk, a Hawaiian podcast. I am excited by this. Pownce is invite only - so I think the quality of people might be quite high, as well as the randomness factor, so this might be the easiest way to meet relevant people (based on my criteria posted earlier).

A Count of All My Current Friends

At the commencement of this experiment, excluding duplicates, my count is:

YouTube: 10 (friends + subscribers)
Pownce: 3
Facebook: 5
Friendster: 0
Flickr: 1
Kindfish: 9
Myspace: 2 (including the ubiquitous Tom)

Grand total: 30
Friends needed: 970

The Ground Rules

Well, if I'm going to run an experiment with any kind of credibility (and this is not meant to be scientific), I need to lay down some ground rules.

1. First, the friends I add to my social networks must be relevant. They must be people I am interested in.
2. These must be actual people, not groups, or films, or bands. They must be individuals
3. The friends must not be duplicates from different networks

I also need to limit the number of networks I use for this experiment, mainly to save my sanity (and inbox!). The networks must be loose enough where I don't have to know someone in the real world before they can be my friend (like linkedin). So, these are the networks I have chosen, which I reserve the right to change as the experiment progresses (for instance, if I get an unmanageable amount of spam):

1. Myspace - begrudgingly I am adding this simply because it is so loose. Otherwise I hate it.
2. Facebook - not very loose really, but I use it pretty frequently already. I'd like to see how well I can meet new people through it.
3. Friendster - haven't experimented with this yet, but read that it was one of the first, and therefore perhaps one of the most populous.
4. YouTube - I am already a heavy YouTube user, with 8 subscribers, all interesting people I do not know in the real world. Here I will count both subscribers and friends as friends.
5. Flickr - adding this because there are some really interesting people on Flickr
6. Pownce - technically filesharing, but you have to have a network of friends to share with. I'm not sure how effective this one will be.
   
7. Kindfish - finally, this is the site I work for, and it has many social networking aspects. Not very populous, at least yet, but since I work with it all day, I will be killing two birds with one stone.

In addition, I may not restrict myself to the sites above. If I find interesting people listed elsewhere, I might look them up on the sites above, so I will not rely entirely on the internal social networking mechanisms.

Introductory Post

The purpose of this blog is to document my journey in a social experiment - to accumulate 1000 new friends through social networking websites.