Dress up your Friendster Profile

by David Evans on May 11, 2005 in Dating Sites

Friendster, with 18 million members, continues to add features to member profiles. This time it’s skins- customizable graphics and colors members can change at will.

Friendster Skins let you color your Friendster world. Tough guy? Try Bad Attitude, a collection of broody grays and black. Bright and sunny? Try Marshmallow Peeps for a pastel profile.

This type of customization is easy to implement and let’s people present a bit more of their personality through their choice of skin.

Why oh why didn’t they do this back when Friendster was growing and still relevant?

They also have implemented a feature I despise, the ability to import friends’ email addresses from Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Hotmail, Outlook, MSN Mail, and MSN Messenger. Unless this is done right, people mistakenly invite everyone in their address book, instead of a select few. Witness the SMS.ac address-book spamming issue a few months back.

Sharing:

1 Max May 11, 2005 at 10:47 am: That *is* the worst feature. Plaxo does that, too. LinkedIn still has it. But SMS.ac was arguably the worst.

Profile page color templates: why don’t they have some sort of template builder like the large blogging services. I mean, when it’s about presenting your personality, customization is key, right?
2 Dave Evans May 11, 2005 at 10:54 am: At this point profile look & feel customization is so drop-dead simple I’m amazed more haven’t offered different types like sexy profile, dark & brooding, energetic, slacker, Type-A personaly, etc. As long as skinning/templates does not break user Interface tenents by moving content around too much it can be quite compelling.
3 Max May 11, 2005 at 3:40 pm: I don’t agree 100%. Why “stilt expression” when you can let users be free in the way their main profile is displayed. At least go for free color, font, layout settings. A service could still offer another data presentation layer where users could browse profile information in a standardized layout for “dating efficiency”.
4 Daniel May 12, 2005 at 4:33 am: They gave it some names, but the simple fact that it only changes CSS colour makes it as interesting as a university lecture.

At least it isn’t as customisable as MySpace, because of the free reign people have some pages are just hectic. A few music clips playing on the one page aren’t too freindly with one’s web browser.