In one of my favorite movies, Six Degrees of Separation, Stockard Channing marvels at the eponymous concept of human linkage when a chance encounter turns out to be serendipitous: Will Smith is not only a friend of her bratty kids at Harvard, but the son of Sidney Poitier! Even if the whole thing ends up being a ruse in the movie, the concept still stands: you are linked to anyone else through six people. Since the popularizing of this idea of interconnectedness, we’ve all played the Kevin Bacon game to pass the time on turnpikes, linking any celebrity to that Footlooser in six stars or less. Friendster, however, takes six degrees, limits it to four, and makes the game of who you know, and who they know, not only useful but eminently addictive.

In the very unlikely event that you have managed to live the last six months of your life not knowing about Friendster (unconscionable!), let me explain. Friendster is an online social network that basically works like baseball cards. You fill out a profile listing your interests (how much you love lemon curd, semiotics, croquet), favorite movies (Donnie Darko), books (anything heady), music (anything obscure), and TV shows (anything reality or animation based) and then include a picture of yourself looking hot. Your friends do the same, and you proceed to collect your friends’ witty profiles and thumbnail pictures, thereby accruing their friends’ profiles, and their friends’ friends’ profiles. At last count, I had 57 friends and was connected to 342,262 people in my personal network. That’s a lot of people to not know that you know, you know?

Once you have a friend network set up, there are all sorts of fun ways to waste time on Friendster. You can bookmark someone you have a crush on, and you can even make your bookmark visible so they know you’re smitten. Flirtatious Friendster messages (glorified e-mail) ensue. There’s a bulletin board to quickly spread urgent information to all your friends, such as where everyone is getting drunk that night. My personal favorite feature, however, is the “Testimonial,” a space of power in which you can embarrass your friends or choose to flatter them, depending on your mood. For example, you could say that your friend Shane is the most effortlessly charming person you know (true) or that your “friend” Seth tends to mistake condoms for cigarettes when he’s drunk and tries to smoke them (also true).

Which leads me to what it means to be someone’s Friendster friend, which is, in effect, nothing. I have a few “friends,” aforementioned guy included, who are total weirdos, drunks, vague acquaintances or complete strangers. My “friend” Ben sent me a Friendster message asking if we could be friends just because we both shared a penchant for Square Lake. It wasn’t until weeks later that I randomly met him when he hesitantly waved me over to his booth at the Turf Club and asked, “Sarah?” He turned out to be quite cool and in the end it all worked out. But Friendster friends are all about quantity, not quality.

While some people may use Friendster to find Jazzercise partners or fellow Trekkies (I know a girl who wanted to meet someone who owned all of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s albums on vinyl and succeeded!), Friendster’s underlying motives are pretty transparent: “Friendster is just cheesy online dating for hipsters,” said a woman in the Big V’s bathroom this past weekend. Friendster dating, though, is much less freaky and weird than other forms of online dating due to the utter lack of anonymity. I went on a date with my friend Carl’s boss, and the guy knew he had to buy my drinks and open my car door or Carl would beat him up the next day at the water cooler.

Mark my words: you will love Friendster. You will tweak your idiosyncratic list of interests daily. You will browse the profiles of cute girls with short bangs and boys with floppy hair for hours when you should be reading Lacan. But while Lacan could maybe get you a date with a pretentious academic (and that’s a big maybe), Friendster can get you a date with a pretentious hipster, and that’s a guarantee.