Thursday, November 24, 2005

All of you who have an account on Friendster must be familiar with the 'who's viewed me' option that it introduced a while back. Recently I've been addicted to checking out who's viewed my profile even though a) I haven't updated my Friendster profile for ages and b) most of the time, I only see weird people on the list. It must be the exam stress that's getting my curiosity on overdrive mode.

There are some facts that have to be taken into account when assessing this particular Friendster option:

1. You can choose to view others' profiles anonymously. When viewing profiles anonymously, you won't be included in the person's 'who's viewed me' list.

2. Anonymously viewing profiles means you can't check your own view list, that is Friendster won't keep record of who's viewed YOUR profile. All you can see is the profile view count and not the glorious details.

3. You can send 'smiles', supposedly to 'brighten up the day' (Friendster's words, not mine) of the person whose profile you viewed. Err, yeah. Okay.

Conclusion?
Those people who you can see on your list either a) opted NOT to be anonymous, in which case, you should be asking why do they want the people to know who they are? OR b) don't know that you can opt to be anonymous, in which case, they must not really be too overly enthusiastic about Friendster. Now, sometimes when you see a person's picture, you KNOW that he's the kind to go around looking at girls' profiles, thus he IS very enthusiastic about Friendster, hence he MUST know about the anonymous option, hence he must have CHOSEN to be known.

So what does it mean when a plain 27-year-old guy views your profile and sends you a 'smile'?

Really. I can't comprehend the reasons that these people do what they do. It's one step further than grammatically incorrect messages ('hi, can we b fren?'). Like... so you sent a person a 'smile', so what? Are you trying to get a reply out of it? If not, what's the point? I really don't know how these people think.

But they DO make Friendster entertaining. If not for them, countless females logged on to Friendster out there would feel unattractive. It really does boost your ego a little bit when you get a message saying 'i feel compeled to write 2 u'. Who cares if 'compelled' really needs a double L?

And I'm sure that the female equivalent exists. I'm sure guys out there have had Jap-looking girls (except not all of them really look like THAT in real life) asking them whether they can b fren. And I'm so sure that I bet my money on it that you boys stand up a little straighter, with chests protruding a little more, after you've read that sort of messages.

So some of the interesting people on my list are my ex and this icky guy I knew from JC, and of course that strange guy with the 'smile'.

Who's viewed you?