Friendster to Erase Early Posts and Old Photos

Friendster, which started in 2003, has long been eclipsed by younger, more nimble rivals, turning into something of a ghost town. But on Tuesday, its current owners told users of plans to change its business strategy — and to wipe out the site’s trove of digital memories, including ancient dorm-room photos, late-night blog entries and heartfelt friend endorsements, known as “testimonials.”

That set off a wave of nostalgia among Friendster members, even though most had stopped visiting the site long ago.

Jim Leija, 31, who works at a nonprofit music organization in Ann Arbor, Mich., recalled courting his partner, Aric Knuth, through the site.

“All of our early exchanges were with each other through their messaging systems,” he said. “We were writing early love notes back in the winter of 2003.”

Mr. Leija said that even though he had not used the service in three or four years, the news of its plans to erase older material tugged at his heartstrings. “Your emotions get wrapped up in it,” he said. “It reflected a particular moment in time in our lives.”

The mass deletion of so much evidence of embarrassing wardrobe choices and unrequited crushes might come as a relief to some, especially in an era when it seems that everything uploaded to Facebook can haunt people forever. But some say Friendster has unexpectedly turned into a time capsule with snapshots of who they once were. It is a version of their history that is not in a scrapbook or dusty shoebox but is live on the Web — for now.

“We want to forget our misdeeds and bad choices, but we also kind of want to remember them,” said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “These old networks are our memories.”

Joanne McNeil, who studies and writes about Internet culture, said that as more of life is lived on the Web, people become more emotionally invested in the presence of particular online services, even those they have abandoned.

Ms. McNeil added that the realization that years of history could be deleted on a corporate whim was jarring.

“The impermanence of the Web used to be a way of life,” she said. “A site could be gone in weeks, months. But Google and Gmail came along and changed that, and now we always expect to have a copy of our lives online.”

Friendster’s plans to strip the service of older material reminded some of Yahoo’s move in April 2009 to pull the plug on GeoCities, an early provider of free Web home pages. At the time, Internet tinkerers and historians worked to keep the site’s millions of pages from disappearing forever. Jason Scott is the founder of a group called the Archive Team that tries to save such online content. He recently rallied efforts to preserve clips from Google Video, which Google is shutting down in favor of the more popular YouTube.

Mr. Scott said that the shuttering of social Web services and online communities was a “critical cultural issue.”

“This is the everyday neural activity of a world, of a society, scooped up and saved,” he said. “To me, that’s completely valuable and worthwhile to make sure it is saved for the future.”

Mr. Scott said his group planned to try to download as much of Friendster’s public data as possible before it is erased at the end of May, and to make it available online in some form.

Friendster’s current owner, MOL Global of Malaysia, said the site’s basic profile information and lists of friends would remain intact as it becomes more of an entertainment site. It is offering ways for members to download threatened photos and other material.

Friendster was once considered a hot property. The site’s financial backers included Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, and K. Ram Shriram, one of the first investors in Google. In fact, Google offered to buy Friendster for $30 million in 2003, but the site’s founder, Jonathan Abrams, chose to keep it independent. When MOL Global bought it in late 2009 for an undisclosed sum, it said the site had more than 115 million members, though it was not clear how many of those were active.

Reached by phone on Tuesday, Mr. Abrams said he had not yet heard of the planned changes to the site. And he said he was surprised that anyone would care.

“It’s so old news to me,” said Mr. Abrams, who is involved in projects including a work space for start-ups and a social media venture. “After it was bought by the Malaysian company, that was the final chapter.”

 

Chinese State Media, in a Show of Openness, Print Jet Photos

 

BEIJING — The J-15 Flying Shark is China’s newest attack jet, a sinuous fighter with the folding wings, shortened tail cone and bulked-up landing gear it needs to serve on China’s first aircraft carrier, which is expected to start sea trials soon. It is indisputable evidence of China’s growing mastery of military technology.

Also military technology of Russia and Ukraine, albeit not entirely with their consent.

Barely two weeks after splashing photographs of the aircraft carrier on the Internet, China’s state media on Monday published the first close-up pictures of the J-15. The day before, Web sites that focus on China’s military had run the same photograph, snapped outside the Shenyang plant in northeast China where the plane is being developed.

Like the aircraft carrier it will call home, the jet faces years of tests and refinement before it will formally enter service, military analysts say. The photographs nevertheless suggest that the People’s Liberation Army, long notoriously secretive, is lifting some veils.

“The recent spate of releases of photographs of airplanes under development is a sign of relaxed control of military information in China,” Lan Yun, an editor at the Beijing-based Modern Ships magazine, said in an interview. “It could be seen as a sign of more transparency of the Chinese military.”

Mr. Lan and Andrei Chang, the Hong Kong-based editor of Kanwa Asian Defense Review, said that the photograph indicated that the aircraft had passed factory tests and was now bound for flight testing.

Internet posts by analysts and Chinese aviation enthusiasts point to a fighter crammed with the best technology China can produce: holographic “heads-up” instrument displays, advanced anti-ship radar and, Mr. Lan said, self-guiding missiles, in contrast to the gravity-controlled bombs and sight-guided missiles that largely populate China’s existing 3,200-aircraft fleet.

When it is deployed — probably sometime after 2015 — the J-15 will signal the dawn of a new ability by China to assert authority along its coastline.

The carrier and its jet are said to employ the best Chinese technology, but both are also direct descendants of weaponry devised in the dying days of the old Soviet Union.

China’s new carrier, expected to be christened the Shi Lang, is a retrofitted version of a 1988 Soviet aircraft carrier that Chinese interests bought from Ukraine after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, supposedly for conversion into a floating casino in Macao. But the Macao gambling license never materialized, and as many had suspected, the ship wound up elsewhere — in Dalian, a city in northeastern China where workers began a decade-long retrofit.

The J-15 has followed an even more tortuous route.

At the century’s turn, many news reports say, the Chinese beseeched Moscow to sell them a Sukhoi-33, a 1980s Soviet fighter capable of landing on carriers. Moscow refused. But in 2001, the Chinese bought an Su-33 prototype from Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and began a teardown to learn its secrets.

The Russians were incensed.

Yet the J-15 unofficially unveiled this week, which externally seems a clone of the Su-33, in fact has been remade inside with Chinese improvements. Mr. Lan said that advances in the plane’s outdated avionics and missile-guidance systems had made it a far more sophisticated version of the Russian jet.

The J-15 is being compared in some quarters to the American F-18, a workhorse on Navy carriers. But Mr. Lan said it had a shorter range, in large part because its takeoff method — flying off a ski-jump-style runway — dictated that it could carry less fuel than a comparable American jet, which is propelled off a flat carrier runway.

Flying a ski-jump is not duck soup. And in February, a Ukrainian court convicted a Russian man of conspiring to give the Chinese details of a Crimean air base that had been used to train Su-33 pilots to take off from a carrier’s ski-jump ramp.

In Huludao, a navy installation on China’s northeast coast, workers are said to have built a rough clone of the Crimea test center, complete with a ski ramp for ascending jets.

None of this is exceptional. Russian, Chinese and American espionage agents wage unacknowledged wars to steal the others’ technology.

But the Chinese, some experts say, are notably adept.

“They take what they can get, and improve what they can,” Abraham M. Denmark, an independent expert on China’s military in Washington, said in an interview. “It’s a strategy that permeates many of their innovations.”

 

Photos: What Would You Name This Baby Giraffe?

 What Would You Name This Baby Giraffe? - ABC News / TechnologyFacebook?ESPN?ABCHot Topics:
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