i was sceptical when i first heard about friendster.com. nevertheless, i decide to give it a try, since i've got nothing to lose. you see, i'm paranoid about disclosing my personal informations on the web. i hardly submit my real detail whenever i register for anything on the web, unless i really really trust the website. maybe i've been reading too much on identity fraud and how people get caught for forwarding racist email or trading mp3s on the net.

back to friendster, my initial thought was that it's just another site which groups certain people together to exchange messages or maybe share files, a la yahoo! groups or circles99.com. boy i was wrong. as more and more people registered, it turned out to be a very useful site.

now this is a site, where i get to find people which i have lost contact for a long time. besides, you might never know who might find you! it happened to me recently, when a kindergarten friend who i almost forgot, added me into her list. initially, i have totally no idea who she was. we were exchanging messages in friendster until i decide to add her in my instant messenger list. after a few rounds of chat, i finally recalled who she was. what surprises me though, is her ability to remember in details so many things about me when i was a kindergarten kid, whereas i almost lost all my kindergarten memories, save for a few very unforgetable moments. now that i've had her contacts, i wish that i could spend more time talking to her, just to regain all those past memories. so far, we haven't got to meet up yet, because of our busy schedules. futhermore she's currently studying in kl and seldom comes back to melaka.

and then there's another girl, paik ge, and her cousin, pelf yeen, who used to sit the same school bus as me during my primary school years. we kinda lost contact with each other after i stopped travelling on that school bus, though we stay in the same neighbourhood. paik ge happened to see my brothers in kl a few weeks back and got their contacts. i didn't know any of this until she added me in friendster, and told me all about it. i told her i never seem to bump into her in malacca anymore (malacca is so small that you are likely to bump into someone you know almost anywhere, seriously!). only then i found out the her whole family moved to penang. still, she is studying in kl now and i might go meet up with her someday.

so what else does friendster.com does for me? hmm i guess the most significant feature would be pictures! tons of them! well, it interesting to see how your friends changed and all. i remember a few times when i actually dropped my jaw seeing the latest pictures of my friends. there was one particular fri...ermm...acquaintance (wiyang should know this) who changed so much i thought she had a plastic surgery. and there was a photo which confirmed rumours about a friend getting married. so it's true that a picture tells a thousand words huh? there's even pictures to show that a particular person is currently attached to another person. hmm..saves the trouble of telling each and everyone, i guess.

i really salute the person who thought of friendster concept...