September 04, 2004
Friendster as Magazine! It's All About "Me" and My Friends!
We love magazines. We love one-off zines, obscure, handsomely bound four-pound design tomes that cost as much as a Super Bowl ticket. We love offensive style and culture ( aka, "lifestyle") magazines with attitude, humor and fearless content (think Vice). We love flipping though Bon Apetit as much as we do Scientific American and Mass Appeal. We're mag freaks.
We love thick shelter mags produced by middle-aged trust-fund kids with a penchant for pattern and hyper-sensitive aesthetic antenna (think Next). We're passionate about music mags written by a collection of half-literate chain-smoking British "nu jazz" DJs and Japanese noise-headz who fill their articles with academic music-speak and obscure references to Karlheinz Stockhausen (think Straight No Chaser or Wire). And we especially love multi-lingual East-meets-West cutting-edge and arty pop-culture pubs like Tokion.
Of course, we also love reading a wide-variety of the monthly mainstream commercial mags, some of which get delivered right to our doorstep. The big mags like Wired, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair are dependable and well written. The smaller mags and zines can be hit or miss.
But even a rag--mainstream or bitstream--with mediocre content might still be worth the price of purchase for excellent graphic design, photography or the expression of an intriguing idea(s). Or maybe the graphics suck, but the writing is so hot it's on fire, and we'll gladly fork over the cash every month (or whenever it's published) to get a copy.
That brings us to Me, a new magazine title with a fresh idea. Or rather, it's a fresh take in mag publishing centered on an idea that was a key feature of the social-networking boom on the Web (e.g., Friendster) during the past year and a half. We have yet to have a look between the covers and judge Me's contents--editorial or visual--as to its quality and merits.
The idea behind Me is straightforward enough: Publish a magazine devoted to profiling a handful of a person's friends and explain the connections between them. For each issue, a different guest editor will direct the editorial content and style to the extent that he or she will select the friends to be covered in the magazine, pick the photographer and determine the typography.
The New York-based Me is the creative spawn of Angel Chang and Claudia Wu, both previously colleagues at Visionaire magazine. When not working on Me, Chang works at Donna Karan as a design assistant while Wu is the design director of Index magazine.
On the cover of the premiere issue is an artist named Joshua Abelow ("Who?" you ask. "Dunno," we say.), an alum of Wu at the Rhode Island School of Design. The table of contents in the debut issue supposedly includes a chart showing the connections between the guest editor and the various profiled friends.
The first question about Me that comes to mind is this: Can the friends profiled in an issue of Me include Friendster "friends"? "Friendster friends?" you ask. You know, those people listed as "friends" on your Friendster page who pinged you out of the blue in early 2003 asking to be your "friend" and of whom you know next to nothing and with whom you have next to nothing in common. Now that could really spice things up if you decide your real-life buddies are too boring to be in a magazine.
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Posted by typhoon at September 4, 2004 11:27 AM
