Networks

I was reading SF Weekly today and ran across an article about Friendster and how people are socially hacking the service. The whole idea of having a social network tool on the web is pretty good, but it's almost inevitable that people would start taking advantage of it.

In this case people are creating fake identities for things like celebrities, or fictional characters, or locations, and setting up large networks of connections to those fake identities.

It's kind of amusing but I guess it's not that different from popular existing de-facto social networks like Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! Interests, MSN Groups, Meetup.com, or even explicit dating/sex hookup sites like Match.com or Alt.com or Adultfriendfinder.

Which begs the question of how long it will be before somebody comes up with a sex network web site. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, though I am aware of the the sexchart but it's a pretty simple and relatively static thing. I envision a sex networking site would work much like Friendster. You would fill in a profile and invite all the people you've slept with to join. Unlike Friendster you'd have to allow aliased identities, and maybe some bandwidth limiting things like only allowing one photo. Put it together with some sort of moderation thing to limit fake spam identities, maybe a rating system like on eBay, and it could be lots of fun.

In fact I can see this as a useful sexual reputation resource. You could give feedback about the sexual performance of your partners. LOL! On second thought maybe this would not be such a popular thing!

But consider the usefulness of such a network. You'd get feedback about a social circle of sexually interested partners and manage to weed out the losers. The medical applications of such a network are also formidable. It would be easy to warn sexual cliques in the event of infection with STDs. Although I can see this being both a plus and a liability: responsible people would use it and help people get treated while others would be frightened away.

Joining a sexual reputation network would probably be embraced by some subset of the sexual society, like the swingers for example or perhaps the gay party circuit, but I suspect others would be leery of getting involved. The key would be to make it friendly to women because where they go the males follow. And to limit abuse by horny and desperate guys of course.

Actually after some browsing around it seems Adultfriendfinder already does something like that, allowing users to set up a private network of other members. But that's the problem, it's member based and I think you have to pay to play. You really need something low cost, or maybe free and ad driven. Plenty of porn advertising which could pay for it I suspect.

I've set up a Friendster account for my Perseus persona, mostly to see how it all works. Not that I expect much in the way of networking out of it. Most of my partners who are the subject of this weblog are not interested in advertising their proclivity to fool around with sexy strangers, But I must confess, I find the idea of a network of people such as myself to be rather seductive. It would certainly make arranging sexual encounters with erotic strangers even easier then it is now.