Slashdot Mirror
Friendster Back from the Dead?
garzpacho writes "With a fresh infusion of $10 million in funding, Friendster is making a bid to rejoin the social networking A-list. The cash, from VC firm DAG Ventures, accompanies plans for a complete project redesign, a focus on adult users and a newly awarded patent for social networking. A real comeback might be unlikely, though: 'Turnaround stories for companies that draw on advanced Web technology known collectively as Web 2.0 remain unprecedented, says David Sze, a general partner at Greylock who specializes in consumer Internet companies but does not invest in Friendster. Still, Sze says Friendster doesn't need to have a MySpace-size traffic explosion to turn a profit. Says Sze in an e-mail, 'If those users are reasonably valuable and monetizable, I think [investors] can make money on their investment.''"
all the fake photos I need are on Myspace!
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
I still have an account on there. I really like their birthday reminders, lets me know which friends to avoid so I don't end up having to buy them birthday gifts.
Why buy Windows every year when you can buy Windows 3.1 on eBay for the cheap? It has everything except DirectX for games, or the ability to run .NET and Office 2003 applications, but so does Linux.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBNBQRXvkps
(This is a joke)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
hey DAG Ventures, 1999 called, they want their stupid investors back!
Friendster making a comback, but so are discos.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The problem with ANY new or 're-established' "web 2.0" social networking site is that the existing ones are firmly entrenched, and theres not a big reason to switch to a different one if all your friend are already on the one you have.
:)
They're going to have to do something different and unique to get noticed, otherwise they have a snowball's chance in hell of making it work.
Obliterate advertising!
If I get hold of a once-marketable name, slap some "Web 2.0" style buzzwords on it, and do some patent-trolling, can I have $10 million in venture capital too?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"With our patent on social networking, we really don't need traffic at all. Maybe just enough to have a claim to *be* a valid site so that we can extort... erm... exercise our patent rights with actual... erm... other social networks that have beat us to the... erm... violated our intellectual property at the expense of our feckless... erm... creative leadership."
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
MySpace will crush this pretty quick...
I see this comeback being about as successful as the Napseter comeback.
I think I was speak for most slashdotters with "Meh". I am still hoping for Pets.com to get back with Web 2.0.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The internet bubble called. They want their marketingspeak back.
How long until we have a repeat of the IM wars? One network is going to want to be compatible with another network, but can't because that network won't open up its protocols. One network might even join forces and share compatibility with other networks (e.g., Friendster, Facebook) to take on one giant, established network (Myspace).
Hopefully, someone will come out with some kind of meta-network that lets me join each network and keeps up-to-date a basic compatibility (e.g., like GAIM and Trillian do for IM).
How exactly are they going to make money?
With those googleads like ads they got there??
http://www.friendster.com/
Wincopy
Friendster is great, but, though I personally traffic it more than MySpace, I'll never pay to use it (or allow myself to be nickel-and-dimed for using features within it), nor will I click on any ads featured within it. Frankly, I don't see how monetization of Friendster is possible; even those of my colleagues who are "hard core" Friendster users (i.e., visiting the site daily, frequent message/picture posting, etc) have no intention of paying for the service. Too many free options exist outside of Friendster for this approach to be successful; users will simply flock to the next "free" (as in beer) social networking service should Friendster become too heavily monetized.
I think they're doomed.
why doesn't myspace just buy friendster? They can afford it and friendster is cheap. It would also save me and others the trouble of managing yet another social networking profile. ==== Glogger Community http://glogger.eyetap.org/
This line is golden: "If those users are reasonably valuable and monetizable"
Key word there being "IF" users are monetizable. In other words, they don't know how to make money off them, but if they did, they'd be rolling in dough.
Thanks for the laugh VCs.
is anybody else who uses OpenDNS having trouble visiting http://www.businessweek.com/?
Nathan Friedly
I still have an account on there. I really like their birthday reminders
I get a kick out of Friendster because I get emails saying I haven't logged in "in a while" and how great it would be if I logged in. Friends get the same emails, and we all ignore them, because friendster had/has nothing to offer beyond a popularity contest. I grew out of worrying how MANY friends I had years ago.
We agreed it was like a desperate ex...popping up every once in a while, telling you how nice it'd be to hear from you...
Please help metamoderate.
I think they might pull it off if they offered some sort of niche social networking, maybe for adults/woring professionals past college age that could use social networking tools without all the crap and creepiness found on myspace. I would use something like that.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
If those users are reasonably valuable and monetizable
That's not a very cromulent word.
These silly social networking sites are like bars: there's very little that the owner can do to make it "cool". Whether it's "cool" or not is largely determined by the mob mentality of their customers and inertia. It's unlikely that Friendster will make any kind of significant comeback. MySpace has too much inertia, and if it truly is social, then people want to hang out where their friends already do.
They seem to be hiring again. If you enjoy a real challenge and have the skill-set..
-- jimmycarter
MySpace and Friendster are so lame. Everybody's space looks so amature and the dicussions are insipid. Please, for the future of humanity, at least pick up the phone for a real conversation.
They can do what MySpace did, and pay 100,000 girls a hundred bucks each to pretend that they are "bi."
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Judging from your UID, that would have been 3 or 4 years ago then?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Does that mean Taco has never had friends?
The whole slashdot phenomenon suddenly makes sense.
I hope somebody sets fire to you for posting this shit.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
The patent drafter can say anything he wants in the description, like "a system in accordance with the present invention includes a computer and a keyboard", but the only rights the owner gets are in the claims. Friendster's patent rights amount to (every word in this must be present in a competitor's product in order to successfully sue for infringement - caveat...not considering doctrine of equivalents): 1. In a computer system including a server computer and a database of registered users that stores for each registered user, a user ID of the registered user and a set of user IDs of registered users who are directly connected to the registered user, a method for connecting a first registered user to a second registered user through one or more other registered users, the method comprising the steps of: setting a maximum degree of separation (Nmax) of at least two that is allowed for connecting any two registered users, wherein two registered users who are directly connected are deemed to be separated by one degree of separation and two registered users who are connected through no less than one other registered user are deemed to be separated by two degrees of separation and two registered users who are connected through no less than N other registered users are deemed to be separated by N+1 degrees of separation; searching for the user ID of the second registered user in the sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are less than Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user, and not in the sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are greater than or equal to Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user, until the user ID of the second registered user is found in one of the searched sets; and connecting the first registered user to the second registered user if the user ID of the second registered user is found in one of the searched sets, wherein the method limits the searching of the second registered user in the sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are less than Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user, such that the first registered user and the second registered user who are separated by more than Nmax degrees of separation are not found and connected.
...until this Web 2.0, 'social', {insert more buzzwords here} crap fad is over.
Unfortunately, something even more lame and stupid will probably replace it...
Sigh.
That reminds me -- I need to delete my Friendster account.
I shouldn't be hesitant about it; after all, Friendster has done exactly zilch for me. But I worry that my dropping out might negatively impact, even a little bit, the social networks of my friends, particularly those who joined at my invitation. Still, I cannot abide that my social network is being used to further an unconscionable power grab via an illicit "patent." So the account's going to have to get killed sooner or later...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
No way; Friendster has totally set them up the bomb. MySpace has no chance to survive, so they might as well make their time.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Humph! They added AJAX controls to the frontpage, added vids, blogs, blah, blah - not impressed.
Just because it used AJAX, ATLAS, .NET 2.0 or any of the "new" technologies doesn't mean anything. It's still going to be bottom-barrel internet fodder. The idea of social networking and reputation driven sites have been around for ages (look at /.)
The question then is this: do social networking communities or even reputation servers in the longrun do anything for anyone, except in small specialized communites (like bushmen tribes in the Australia and maybe even slashdot), or in the case of commerce; i.e. Google, Ebay, Amazon, etc?
All attempts I have seen outside of this, Friendster or dare I mention Orkut, have failed. I do recall seeing quite a bit of activity from west coast users however on sites like Tribes, but again these were activity based groups that had RL connections. Again, I look to the idea that like most social based networks, unless united by a common and specialized purpose tend to fall apart. And we wonder why world peace seems so far away.
/* somewhat functional - fix later */
Please don't consider this spam, because it really IS relevant - a friend of mine has started a very slick new social networking site, uses CSS, has RSS feeds, IM chat similar to Gmail... The feature set is really amazing, it's got feature parity or better with every social networking site I've ever seen and evite and blogging, has unlimited photo sharing, and does email as well. It's called Zoji, please check it out before you mod this. /. that'll the day for Dan :)
Here is the About Us page. He considers it really "pre-launch" still because he's waiting before advertising and a real media push until he adds some more really cool stuff that's coming (development is Fast), but if you want to check it out give some feedback, this is my profile page and they have a to give the developers feedback.
Maybe someday it will get posted on the frontpage of
You're looking for People Aggregator.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I used a Windows 3.1 machine not so long ago. Machine itself was slow, but it was interesting to note that it was damn responsive to user inputs. Did we forget something that we once knew?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
a Beowulf cluster of friends!
It's easy, Friendster, just do what your competitors can't do.
1. Quit having unexpected errors every 10 minutes
2. Actual search functions that allow exact matches, etc. Not a fake search engine that returns everything.
3. No huge influx of Brazilian users
4. Don't allow customization of pages to the point of saturating a T1 connection upon viewing.
5. Actual active moderators(in message boards, etc).
6. No spyware-deploying ads.
7. No private profiles. No purpose of a private profile on a social networking site.
8. No orkut-like invite system. No new user filtration like facebook has.
9. And the big one: no spambots allowed. Captchas, ACTIVE IP banning, and numerous other defenses. Myspace is losing the war on this.
If Friendster can set a solid ground with doing the above, maybe they can get some converts from those who are tired of myspace's problems.
Friendster might still be trying to come back, but according to Steven Colbert, he's still actively trying to look for his new Black Friend(tm) on Blackfriendster.com!
What's the site that automatically generates these? I refuse to believe that you actually wrote all of this.
I suspect they got the cash infusion because they just got a very general patent on social networking. They could force just about every other social networking site to pay them lots and lots of money.
The stuff about "resurrecting" Friendster seems to be more of a PR move. They'll try to compete, but pretty soon, they'll claim they can't compete because other sites have stolen their patented ideas. Then Friendster can sue these sites and claim even more damage.
Ok.... This has REALLY gotten out of control. You can now award a patent for a method of social networking?!?!?! This is ridiculous, and the idiot who awarded the patent should be publicly humiliated. I mean, REALLY humiliated, because we now allow methods of making freinds a patentable concept. I hope that someone with cajones flagrantly challenges the legitimacy of this law and it is thrown ou, because the patent process has clearly gotten out of control.
-----
Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Wasnt this the site that gained a bunch of hoopla when they rewrote it PHP? And according to other posts on this list they are still having problems? And they are rewriting it *again*? Someone's eating crow here methinks...
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002150.htm l
Tip to developers: Steer clear of the consultant who tells you "oh, it's appserver X that's the reason why our performance sucks, we'll port it to Appserver Y and everything will be smashing!"
Greylock doesn't simply "not invest" in Friendster; they're the lead investor in LinkedIn, Friendster's direct competitor.
I have done my best to keep my friends list at 0 for a while on friendster... and I hope it stays that way, I am anti-popularity and less I use it the better my chances!