Rather than drop you in a Hobbesian world of antisocial maniacs, Friendster made you a profile and sought to re-create online your actual social world—the people you really knew, friends, co-workers, family, and the like—while providing one place to deal with all of them. Like so many successful tech companies, it was marketing a form of human augmentation, in this case of social capacities.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 990