In the annals of trendy Web sites, Friendster's entry will read: If you came after beta, you missed the party. Since its appearance last summer, the posse-sharing service has become a true Wella Balsam phenomenon: You sign up, tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on. The online community has invited more than 376,000 members, plus a slew of critics and copycats.
Even though Friendster hasn't been officially released, a backlash has already set in. First came the suck sites like Fiendster and Enemyster. Then complaints of overtaxed servers, slow loading times, and annoying reminder evites. Banner ads and a scheduled move to paid subscriptions may provide the company with cash to unclog the pipes, but skeptics predict Friendster's shift from free to fee will kill its cool. Still, all the whining hasn't stopped others from jumping on the bandwagon: Everyone's Connected lays out a similar six-degrees-of-separation design, adding a personal diary section for those who need to vent, and LinkedIn lets users hit up colleagues for jobs. Both are free.
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