Posted 6:53 PM by John A. Seafisk

With Friendsters Like These...

Upon the advice of a few friends, I signed up with this website friendster.com. The idea of this site is to broaden your friendship horizons by meeting friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, friends of friends of friends of friends....and so on. People are inter-connected through their own 'personal network', where you can look at someone's profile and see who their friends are, and see what their interests happen to be...and maybe meet someone for a friendly get-together or much more.

So, I sign up, and within a week, I already have 12 friends linked to me in one degree of separation. According to Friendster, I'm connected to over 30,000 people throughout my 'Personal Network' in furthering degrees of separation.....and 29,993 of them I'm connected through via Maura.

Now I'm all set! Ready to open wide the doors to online social interaction! Look out ladies, here I come! So, let's just log on to 'www.friendster.com', and......

What's this? "DNLL server error...cannot find this website." Oh, they must be updating it. I'll try a little later.

A little later - click, click, click, return...it's loading....it's loading.....still loading...

"DNLL server error....cannot find website."

Hmmm. Seems to be a glitch of some kind.

2 hours later - "DNLL server error....cannot find website."

6 hours later - "DNLL server error....cannot find website."

The next day.....success! Logging in name & password, then enter. *click*.

Loading.....

Still loading......

Still loading......

Still loading....................

"DNLL server error....cannot find website."

Later that evening - "DNLL server error....cannot find website."

And the next day after that.....loading.....loading.....loading......loading....

"DNLL server error....cannot find website."

OK, so after some near misses and many far-off-the-target misses, it appears I'll have to meet people the old fashioned way....by meeting them.

Darn it.