The idea for "The Friend Project" was born during the summer of 2003 over a couple of beers at a neighborhood bar. I was getting together with a couple of friends who I hadn't seen in a while and eventually our conversation turned to the topic of "Friendster" (Friendster was one of the earliest social networks, a precursor to Facebook and Myspace). I had never heard of Friendster and as we talked, I became more and more intrigued with the idea of making friends with strangers via the internet and I decided to incorporate some of these ideas into a project of my own.
The most intriguing thing for me about online communities is that often times the participants never meet each other in person. In a strange way, collecting friends can become a lot like collecting baseball cards. I decided to create a project where I would visit everyone that I met through Friendster in person (regardless of where they lived) and document our experiences together.
I joined Friendster a few days after learning about it and I contacted everybody that I knew who was already a member. I asked them to contact all of the members that they knew and to inform them of my project. I was pretty amazed when a few days latermy project had grown to nearly sixty participants (most of whom I had never met before). The only restrictions that I placed on myself were that each participant had to approach me in order to join the project and that nobody could be rejected.
"The Friend Project" continued to grow over the following months. Initially I had planned to document its evolution through the use of photographs; however, I soon realized that the best way to examine an internet community was by using the internet as my medium. I would visit a participant and ask them to share something with me from their life. These encounters included the making of a rock video, bowling in rural Pennsylvania, writing and performing a song in a Chicago apartment and sipping flaming cocktails from an over sized tiki boat. After eighteen encounters, the world of social networking changed in 2004 with the birth of Myspace. This event marked the unofficial end of Friendster and the official end of "The Friend Project."