“If you were a dedicated Friendster user back when it was still cool, in the days when MySpace just seemed like its skanky sister and Tribe.net its embarrassing hippie uncle, you’d remember Sept. 29, 2005,”this sfgate.com article says.”That was the day Friendster added a new feature — “Who’s Viewed Me.” For 24 hours, everyone whose profile you’d looked at in the past month knew you’d been to their page, and you could see everyone who’d peeped on you.The ramifications took a few minutes to set in. It was so gratifying to see who’d been looking. Random dude from France! Random married lady from Ohio! My friend Matt! His friend Fred! My ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend! My ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend? I had been to her page, too.OH NO.A flurry of e-mails and phone calls established the collective horror of this development. Friendster realized it had made a big mistake, and quickly gave people the choice to remain anonymous or not. Like most social networking features, “Who’s Viewed Me” was a hot topic for a week or so before it receded into the babble.But the phenomenon reveals just how much computer technology has abetted voyeurism — and just how tempting (and foolhardy) it is to try to achieve the transparency of a one-way mirror.Over the past few years, a number of Web sites — Spyspace, Trakzor, ProfileSnoop, MixMaps, WhosViewedMe — have sprung up to allow social networking site users to spy and be spied on”.

Online,no one knows you.Really?

“If you were a dedicated Friendster user back when it was still cool, in the days when MySpace just seemed like its skanky sister and Tribe.net its embarrassing hippie uncle, you’d remember Sept. 29, 2005,”this sfgate.com article says.”That was the day Friendster added a new feature — “Who’s Viewed Me.” For 24 hours, everyone whose [...]