A snapshot of my main blogger account. 

Miss Cleo "CALL ME NAOW!" 

Bicycles in the snow 

New York Bloggers Convention 

I spent more time on Friendster than Tribe at first... 

I feel kinda guilty (O.K., very guilty) because I've been, like, tripping out on friendster while saving my serious discussions for tribe.net :-) but hey, when/if friendster crashes I'll just creep back to tribe and stay put. I like it there.

Oh, and I have taken the email account, tribewhore, at the hot mail site (you know the one...) feel free to send me a line.

I came across this post from the GeekBox blog (excerpt):

With anything that grows at an exponential rate, there is a tipping point at which it takes off. Tribe.net hasn't quite gotten there yet, but I'm starting to see signs of something new and different. As I was trying to point out before, it comes down to subtleties.

In this particular case, I suddenly noticed the utility and novelty of the simple fact that you can see to which tribes other people belong. It may not seem like much, but it's actually a big deal. Part of what made Napster (and its successors) useful as a means of discovering new music was the ability to browse other people's music collections. Chances are, if someone's collection contained music that you really really liked and some that you'd never heard of before, the unknown stuff was worth checking out. (c.f. my post on Echocloud)

People on Tribe generally don't list enough musicians, authors, or films to make this sort of cross-pollination work as effectively as it does on a P2P network, but they do list every public tribe to which they belong. Tribes are growing in all different directions, with little centralized planning. The directory is becoming unwieldy, which at first seemed really irritating to me. However, if you poke around your friends and their friends' profiles, chances are you will discover some interesting sounding new tribes amongst ones you're familiar with.

Well, I am slowly but surely expanding my friends network on tribe.net. It's funny in a way, becaue the word "tribe whore" doesn't really fit...I'm deliberately going about this in a more measured, naturalpace than my frenzied gotta-getta-million-friendsters approach to Friendster (perhaps because I find the latter so delightfully ridiculous; it's like some sort of game to me). Anyway, I already feel quite comfortable here, which contrasts greatly with the feeling of impending doom I get on friendster whenever my total friendster count goes down a notch and I realize that Jonathan Abrams and Company are busy beheading some Fakesters on the edges of my network :-) ...

I've created a new tribe so Edith Strocen's friends have a place to "meet" her, exchange news and gossip, post photos, etc. Edith moved away from Winnipeg to Vancouver Island this summer, and we all miss her a great deal.

A recent posting of mine in the "Friendster Sucks" tribe on Tribe.net:

Yes, I am having a BLAST just wandering through my four degrees of separation on Friendster, but to me it's just a game. It's Tribe.net that I treat as reality :-) and I really think the people here have "done it right" as far as building a software-based community. Let's put it this way: when I *DO* start inviting friends onto one of these services, it will be Tribe.net rather than Friendster. Friendster just has this sort of it's-five-minutes-to-closing-time-O-God-I-gotta-meet-someone vibe to it. It's the Fakesters that make the place in my opinion, and when they are gone, so I will be as well.

(repost from Friendster Slut blog, http://friendsterslut.blogspot.com, with a few edit changes)

I have an investor friend who I teast mercilessly for checking his stock quotes several times a day from his PC. But now I've fallen into the same sort of trap myself: I have my Friendster home page open in a corner of my PC, and every 15 minutes or so, I check to see by how many people my personal network has grown. Is it up or down? By how much?

Looking at it from an outsider's objective perspective, I find this behaviour rather disturbing. Somehow Friendster has hooked itself into some deep need of mine....the need to feel connected? the need to feel that I can help by linking people together, much as I do in real life? (or at least, as much as I think I do it in real life) God. This is bringing up all kinds of nasty questions. But I sure the hell am not going to discuss them on Friendster...I'll be heading to tribe.net to talk about that.

This is my take on the difference between tribe.net and Friendster: In a large, fancy restaurant, ten people are seated around a table, deep in conversation, brainstorming, idea-shaping, etc. There's a sense of engagement, commitment, (dare I say it?) community. Those are the tribe.net people.

In the next room, one thousand people are speed-dating over cocktails. That's the Friendster crowd :-)