I’ve thought about this before, but talking with my good friend John tonight on the phone, the subject came up with some force. Have you ever considered the possibility that “services” like Friendster are actually data collection systems for marketing and demographic information? Think about it: the whole thing is built around these things that you like: brands of media that you subscribe to. Growing up in a media-controlled culture, we define our identities by the brands we align ourselves with, or don’t align ourselves with. It’s only natural. Our brands express our position and attitude toward the media culture. Even if we try to flout brands, and go with independent labels, and shit like that. Its still part of the system.

Anyway, so your “profile” what is it really? It has your name, age, sex, location, and lists of things that you like. Then, you have this network of people associated with you, and you can see what they like, and their stats. You could conceivable map out friend-networks of people based around brands and media they share an affinity for. You could map how these vary from person to person, and track similarities and motifs. You could even look at how people use language, and interact with one another in an “authentic” voice. Then you could intelligently mine all this information to develop and market new products in ways that will fit within the brands and voices of the people, according to their age, sex, location, and known brand/media affinities.

It’s such a simple idea to me that I would be almost shocked if they weren’t selling harvested data to research and development and marketing companies. They should be. They could make so much money. Compare this to “club cards” at grocery store, where you get little fractional discounts on items when you use your card. The real reason they have those cards is to track what you purchase and build statistical profiles, mathematical models of their customer base, and the products they consume, and in what patterns. Imagine then that they could figure out a means to compare your friend’s purchase record to yours, and then their friends, and so on. They would be able to build a perfectly complete model of their business, and would conceivably be able to run all kinds of calculations and simulations based on the data they have harvested.

If Friendster is not doing this, they are incredibly dumb. I might wager they hadn’t thought of this, but that other companies have sat up and taken notice, and probably run programs to harvest the vast pool of networked customer profiles that people have freely contributed. If I knew the first thing about how to make this a reality, I would be doing this myself. It seems like there’s an absurd amount of money to be made here, collecting and mining data like this.