I signed up for a new online tool/technology today called Friendster. Maybe you’ve heard of it; it’s “an online community that connects people through networks of friends” for meeting new people. So far I haven’t really figured out what it’s supposed to do for me, because the site is still very much in beta: most of the pages were slow-loading, the people search didn’t give me any results (they’re rumored to have 300,000+ members, so I’d expect some results), and the site just stopped responding to me after several minutes of use each time I tried.

Perhaps the slowness is due to increased exposure to curious users after the write-up it got in Wired by Xeni Jardin (that’s such a great William Gibson-esque name), though I doubt it. I’ll play with it some more, and report what I find.

Interestingly, what got me to Friendster was a link on Robert Scoble’s weblog for Tribe.net, which is another beta social/community website that’s making the rounds—and Xeni Jardin (there she is again) on Boing Boing talking about Tribe.net and writing that she won’t be “ditching her Friendster account anytime soon”—all of which made me curious. So I’ll probably go and try out Tribe.net now, too, because Friendster is slow.

How’s that for making connections and providing links? I think the ultimate social software application is the blog.