Introvertster: Revenge of the Anti-Buddy

Although this is surely a spoof on the Friendster site, it has very interesting meaning. The folks at airbag.ca bring us Introvertster. According to the mini-mission statement on the front page:

Introvertster is an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harassing you online.

You can use Introvertster to:

• Avoid invites to chat, filter out annoying invitations for Meetup, birthday parties, or after-hours get togethers.
• Packet flood a friends Internet connection making it impossible for them to send you an instant message.
• Help your friends get a clue that you really don't like people or care for idle chit-chat.

Create your own barrier to protect yourself against interaction with people. It's easy and fun!

Source: Introvertster via Teledyn

I find this particularly interesting for 2 simple reasons:

• Backlash growing in the Social Networking space as more and more services spawn from the minds and desks of budding entrepreneurs. There are many forces at work here, but the two main camps oppose the analog nature (1,2,3) of the relationships that these sites seem to build and others downright hate being force-fed the service. Some are even profiting (1,2) from the hype.
• Computing, and some of the very real limitations we have are rearing their ugly heads on a much larger scale. I've already on the rather strange relationship we have with our very own Anti-Buddies and talked about the difficulties I saw in Orkut. Both of these instances show that modeling concepts like relationships and personality are not just difficult, at best, but also potentially damaging. Though that may seem grim, surely it's only a matter of time before systems (think WebFountain) are created that can harness more meaningful, latent information as opposed to that which is already "obvious".