'On our second date, Amy turned up on my doorstep armed with a chainsaw - she'd come to help me fix a fallen tree in my yard. I looked at this beautiful 6ft redhead, and I thought yes, she's perfect,' says Jason, a 28-year-old artist from Austin, Texas.
Jason met his girlfriend, Amy, a landscape gardener, through his old roommate, Lauren, who now lives in New York. Lauren was at college with Kevin, a San Francisco-based designer, who grew up with Steve, now a waiter, in Austin, who is best friends with Amy. Jason has never met Kevin, nor Steve, but managed to find his perfect mate through them none the less, with a little help from Friendster.com.
This new networking website has gained a cult following in the States, and is rapidly attracting users over here (launched in March, the site has more than 900,000 users, and is increasing at a rate of 20 per cent every week).
The site works like this: you join Friendster and post your profile online. You then invite your friends to join up. In turn, they invite their friends, too, and so you connect to a network of new people who are up to three degrees of separation away from you. Assuming you have 20 friends, who have 20 separate friends, who in turn have 20 others - that's already 8,000 people you're instantly linked to.
Friendster's brilliance is that it makes online cruising relatively safe and stigma-free. This is especially important in the UK, where internet dating doesn't enjoy the same level of respectability that it does in the States.
Removing the embarrassment factor is key to the site's success. Founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams explains: 'In the past, someone would sign up for a dating site, and hope that their friends and co-workers would never find out. I thought I'd turn that upside down and create a site where people would deliberately invite their friends.'
Friendster's multilayered and collaborative environment is appealing to a new breed of singles. 'It's the first online communication service to break down those walls that make people think online dating is an activity relegated to the desperate and ugly,' says Michael, a handsome writer from Brooklyn who uses the site. The pressure-free arena for flirtation has succeeded in attracting a diverse user base, with an average age of 27.
In addition to linking to your circle of friends, you can write testimonials for each other. If someone you trust writes a glowing testimonial about someone whose profile you fancy, it acts as a stamp of approval.
The flipside to this transparency is that when relationships turn sour, having full details of your ex's social life available at the click of a mouse can be painful. Jenny, a 26-year-old copywriter from London, split up acrimoniously from Tony, her boyfriend in New York, a few months ago. 'I cut off all contact with him. It wasn't like I was going to bump into him in the street. But then, one of our mutual friends connected to me on Friendster and, in a matter of hours, Tony's photo was up online and suddenly the whole break-up seemed very raw again.
'Over the next few weeks, I found myself unable to avoid looking at his developing profile. Girls started commenting on how sexy he was. At first, I was jealous - I could see from their photos and interests that they were very much his type. My friends told me to stop looking at the site but I had a morbid fascination with keeping tabs on who he was sleeping with.
'Then, after reading one testimonial that talked about him attempting to get off with five friends of the same girl, I realised that I was lucky to be rid of him. Bizarrely, I think Friendster helped me get over him.'
Friendster opens up new gateways for exacting an unpleasant revenge. For example, at the click of a mouse, you can expose embarrassing intimacies to all your partner's friends. This darker side of bringing the world closer together is reflected in the fact that prank sites 'Fiendster' and 'Enemyster' have now been set up, too.
Is Friendster the perfect way to match-make? Yes and no, say users. However well you get on online, there has to be a physical chemistry when you finally meet up. At the same time, the couples who seem to have the most successful relationships often meet through mutual acquaintances.
As Abrams points out, having an extra level of information about a prospective partner can only help. And if you're looking for a red-haired beauty wielding a chainsaw, you may have more luck virtually, through friends of friends of friends, than you would at the local All Bar One.
