Very True Things

Another day, yet another social networking site. So, I signed up to Friendster and what do I think?

Design is a bit plain and corporate looking, even a bit old fashioned. There are some limited skinning possibilities, including the ability to write your own CSS - I cut and pasted in the standard Very True Things CSS and it worked reasonably well. If I wanted to I could probably make the page look fairly decent with a little effort.

Signing up was straight forward. The profile is composed of preset fields (once more I did a quick cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on…) and like LiveJournal and MySpace some of them allow you to enter HTML code for extra formatting. University and school details were easy to fill out.

Once again there’s nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site, and also it lacks the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog and have the posts appear automatically. Like Bebo yesterday this lack of interoperability is going to be a major downside for established web users.

Friendster charge for blogs although an ad-supported standard also exists. Setting up a blog was easy and the system supports trackbacks (which puts it ahead of LiveJournal for starters) but the post didn’t show up on my profile page straight away.

None of my friends seemed to already be members already.

Overall, competent but unexciting.