Janette Toral - Book Author and Publisher

A few days ago, my daughter, "J3", informed me that she has an impostor in Friendster.

I’ve been warning J3 of her excessive Friendster - ing. She just love this community as she has so many friends in it. Due to her young age and of the people she met, it can’t be helped that "girl politics" also comes into play.

Then this, a person created a Friendster profile using her identity, re-posted all her pictures and put vulgar sexual insinuation remarks in it. As a parent, this was horrifying.

Through this experience, I was able to put to test how Friendster handles complains:

1. Report profile
   When viewing the offending profile, you can click on the report profile at the bottom and choose from several options. Unfortunately this options are limited and there’s no way that you can explain things further. I did this for 2 days and even posted a message in the bulletin board asking friends to report the profile as well.
2. Find a contact
   After 2 days with no response, I used my LinkedIn to find someone working for Friendster and initiated a pass on request. That hasn’t reap any result as of this writing.
3. Email help@friendster.com
   I got a response from this one on the next day and the profile I complained about was already blocked.

I was already thinking of taking a legal action if the profile has not been put down in order to find out the identity of the person who did it and make them accountable for it. I’m glad that I did not have to reach that point.

Evaluation of Friendster support
The fact that the profile was deleted was a great relief to me. I think they also need to have more support people working for them in order to improve the response time. The lack of response after using the "report this profile" was very disappointing.

So to prevent what happened to J3 from recurring again, I gave a list of do’s and don’ts or else Friendster will be blocked from our home PC.

• Don’t waste time arguing with people she doesn’t know online.
• Post photos because you want to rather than having a "photo competition sport". I am amazed on the volume of photos teens post and it felt like they are competing with each other on levels of "coolness", "prettiness", among others.
• Use the bulletin board responsibly. It is not a medium to rant, indirectly referring to fellow users (of course they know it is them), and challenge your enemies, no matter how right you are.
• Use other social networks when possible. The reason why teens love it here is the capability of being able to jazz up your profile that sites like Multiply or Facebook can’t offer. But then again, when the community is becoming negative, it is best to switch to another and make it an enjoyable experience once again.