Joanne McNeil

In the months leading up to the 10th anniversary of Friendster's founding, I created a brand new profile. One as I would have created it a decade before. And I asked my friends — my new friends — to come join me there. These are people I didn't know then. I got to share my history in an unusual way — show what I used to be like. I would post status updates complaining about my job as a waitress or bragging about reading Ursula LeGuin…. (More on the project here.)

Friendster is 10: The Rules

Create a Friendster profile that accurately represents the way you were ten years ago. Think of this as a role playing game and your character is your past.. The point of this game is to interact with present friends as our old selves. It doesn’t matter if you were online much ten years ago or not

1. Photos: try to post an image roughly ten years old —or an image of something that you might have used as an avatar ten years ago

2. Age: if you were born in 1981 enter your birth year as 1991. If adding ten makes you too young to use the site, lie (as any good internet-using preteen would) and pretend you are 16.

3. Friend requests: you are welcome to track down friends from ten years ago, but what will really make this fun is using Friendster is 10 with current friends.

4. Invites: you are free to invite anyone, but just let them know the rules before they play

5. Interests: think about what movies and music meant something to you ten years ago. Here’s a good place to start: Pitchfork top 50 in 2002, Best books of the 90s, 90s movies

6. Relationship status: if you were in a relationship ten years ago, enter that. If single then, you are single on Friendster is 10.

7. Old profiles: create an entirely new profile for Friendster is 10. You can friend your old profile if you want.

8. Name: You don’t have to use your real name. This isn’t Facebook after all, and understandably you might not want this coming up in google search. But try to fill it out in the way you might have ten years ago.

9. Testimonials: On Friendster people wrote “testimonials” rather than public messages. Things like “Jack is a really cool guy and super great guitar player. We always have fun hanging out” (rather than “Hey, it was cool hanging out last night!”) But! Testimonials are kinda hard to write so a mix of both is fine

We stop “beta testing” on March 22, 2012, the tenth anniversary of Friendster. So keep it a secret — well, among friends I mean — until then. Ideally, we’ll have a pretty good network of activity built up in the meantime.

Ready? Great! Friend me!!! http://profiles.friendster.com/joannemcneil