Quintessential Careers honors one career or job site each issue of QuintZine with the Quintessential Careers Site Award in recognition of quintessential efforts in helping job-seekers.

November 17, 2003: Friendster

Friendster

To mark our new Internet Networking Tutorial, we salute one of the listed sites, Friendster, an online community that connects people through networks of friends for dating, making new friends, and helping your friends meet new people. Fortune magazine notes that "everybody looking for a job" is using sites like Friendster.

Friendster enables users to create their own personal, private community, where they interact with people connected through networks of mutual friends.

Launched in March 2003, the site already has more than 3 million users and has achieved "cult" status, according to Time magazine, which describes the Friendster process this way:

You sign up, post a picture, and fill out a profile form listing your interests and whom you'd like to meet. Then you start building your 'personal network' be begging your friends to sign up, and begging them some more to invite their friends. Soon you could be connected -- by up to four degrees of separation -- to thousands of people. Since you can e-mail and browse only the profiles of people in your network, there's a lot of motivation to keep signing up friends and meeting new ones through the site.

Some users have boasted as many as 500,000+ people in their personal networks. "It's networking the fun way," Time quotes a user as saying.

Friendster is free to users.

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