A little birdie told me that Friendster (aka, the company that fires employees for blogging non-secrets) has launched a new blog/RSS oriented feature--presumably in an effort to remain marginally relevant.

I shit you not.

I can't verify it first hand, since I have no Friendster account anymore. And most of my friends don't either. (Imagine that!)

But they've published some help pages related to it, including What is RSS? and I entered my RSS link in my profile, but I still don't see my entries. Why?.

And, here's a screenshot of how they're advertising it.

So I guess blogs are a Good Thing now--as long as they're not written by an employee. Can you get fired by listing a blog in your profile if you're a Friendster employee? Or does that merely merit a demotion?

Anyone know what User-Agent string they're using? Does it respect robots.txt?

Posted by jzawodn at October 14, 2004 12:25 AM

Reader Comments
# Al said:

Whatever happened to that tuna girl?

on October 14, 2004 01:38 AM
# Al said:

Er, make that Trout Girl.

on October 14, 2004 01:39 AM
# Ivan Tumanov said:

Logged in to check it out, but haven't seen it in action yet, I guess it hasn't pulled an RSS feed from my site yet.

Funny thing is, the little Friendster News blurb says: "Interested in being a part of the Friendster team? We're actively hiring for several positions."

Maybe employees were testing this feature and accidentally got themselves fired.

on October 14, 2004 07:19 AM
# Ivan Tumanov said:

209.11.168.34 ... 80 GET /rss.asp - 200 0 75 234 tumanov.com - -

resolves to:
ns500.gbxsc.friendster.com

Looks like its not using a User-Agent at all, and it didn't fetch robots.txt from my web server before I started seeing these pings. Every 3 minutes! Talk about no respect for anything at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the script didn't even implement proper HTTP.

on October 14, 2004 11:50 AM
# Scott Johnson said:

Thanks for the reminder about the evilness of Friendster. I just cancelled my account. :-)

on October 15, 2004 09:52 AM
# Mike said:

I'm trying to follow this thread back. So she was fired for being a blogger ? Or was fired for something that she blogged ? Because wouldn't those two things are different.

It's obvious that some companies who have bloggers working for them can benefit from what is blogged about, but can't they also be hurt by it as well ? Should it be up to the blogger to decide what is acceptable blog content about work-related things, or should it be up to the company ?
Since a HEAD request would reveal that Friendster is running php and not java, and that is considered non-secret, does that mean that I can run a nessus/port scan on a site, publish the results on my blog ?

Someone smarter than me about such things...help me understand. :)

on October 15, 2004 09:55 AM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

test

on October 15, 2004 09:07 PM
# UrbanBOYS said:

I haven't blogged about work (or blogged AT work) since she got canned. What a chilling effect Friendster had ... that's evil. :-(

JJ

on October 16, 2004 10:34 PM
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