Slashdot Mirror
Friendster's Rise and Fall
ThinkComp writes "A few weeks ago I wrote an open letter to my former friend from school, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, telling him to take Yahoo's money before it's too late. It was meant partly as a joke, and partly as a way to set the record straight on his company's origins, since in financial terms he'll be fine no matter what happens. Now the New York Times has written a story on Friendster, the social network no one talks about anymore. It seems that while history repeats itself every few decades in the global scheme of things, the period of recurrence in Silicon Valley is quite a bit shorter. The moral here: take the billion dollars while you still can."
Does no one remember sixdegrees? The social networking site back in the mid-90's? Nothing? Nobody?
Sig!
Friendster isn't the only network being overshadowed by MySpace. There's also Orkut and the exceedingly lame Hi5, which are very popular in certain regions of the world even as most Americans have never heard of them. Of course, most Slashdot users know that Orkut is overwhelmingly Brazilian, and the language of most discussion forums (and of the woefully common spam) is Portuguese, but Orkut also caught on in Estonia. Meanwhile, Hi5 seems to have attracted quite a crowd of Romanians and Bulgarians.
I suspect MySpace became so popular for the same reason as LiveJournal: users can pick skins for their personal pages, and for some strange reason American teenagers really dig unreadability. Friendster tried to target a general American crowd but didn't offer this vital feature. And the other social networking sites are big in places where the aesthetic values of the American teen don't apply.
A lot of people use FaceBook, despite thinking that it has jumped the shark.
They were smart though. Advertising was part of FaceBook from the beginning & it isn't overly intrusive.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Before it cools off!
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Just as friendster, six degrees, MSN spaces, and others have all fallen, so will MySpace. Has anyone recognized how many fake 'friends', bots, and advertising have invaded MySpace? All of a sudden you sign up and have 1000 friend requests from people you don't know, just to find out that they're all advertisers selling web dating services and strip shows. Anything that's "cool" can't stay cool for long. Can anyone name a fad that remained popular with teenagers for over a year?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
pfft, I was on Firefly! I'm the oldest-school of them all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(website)
(Well, unless you want to count The WELL or USENET in this phenomenon.)
Is it me, or are Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo practicing corporate imperialism? They buy out tons of small companies and most likely prevent further innovations. At this rate, the three companies will own all of these "unique" sites and make it difficult for competitors to break into the market, if not impossible. Yes, Google's motto is "Don't be evil", but seeing from how they've assisted the Chinese government in massive censorship, I doubt they still follow it internally.
One of the few Web 2.0 sites I can think of that isn't owned by these giants is meebo.com, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone bought them out soon. The era of the small internet "company" which participates in true interaction with users is coming to an end. Google may be innovative now, but corporate laziness will eventually set in and the overall quality of work will eventually decrease, similar to what happened in Microsoft.
3. Get overshadowed by copycat
4. Slowly fade out of existence
5. Profit!
Err... wait...
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
Google doesn't even pitch its own social-networking site, let alone try to obstruct others. Those who tried to make something of Orkut are horrified at the flood of spam, the frequent failure of the server, the open pornography, and getting jumped on by Brazilians for posting in English in a forum marked "Language: English". There's no attention paid to the site by its founders.
That's life -- sometimes you need to roll the dice to see what happens. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I personally believe rolling the dice is more fun than always doing the Smart Thing (note: really should be called doing the Average Thing since the Smart Thing seems to be defined as doing what everyone else would do). Unless you're talking about life and death situations, it's really no Big Deal. Silly online networking sites definitely don't count as Big Deals. :)
(Aside: I personally don't believe in "winning" and "losing" when it comes to stuff like this. There's only learning. Anyway, I'll get off my philosophical high horse. :) )
The authors and editors are seriously disconnected from reality if they think Facebook is jumping the shark. Almost everyone on a college campus is on it.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
from the if-money-then-take-if-take-then-run dept.
Hey, that didn't even compile!
unprotected sex
They had a vision
C'mon people! Let's give these guys a break. They had a vision for something great and they tried their best to make it happen. Not every business succeeds, in fact almost many fail. They had the guts, the vision and the nerve to be great.
someone's bitter
No subscription required to read the article here:
1 00-1030_3-6125999.html
http://news.com.com/Wallflower+at+the+Web+party/2
Tribe was bought by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch's company) a few months ago. He seems to have bought near the top. Many of the staff left. The recent site redesign (New! Web 2.0!) was something of a flop. Currently, the most active tribe seems to be "Tribe.net bug reports". Alexa traffic rankings show that Tribe.net peaked around January 2006. It's been downhill since. The current traffic level is about half the peak.
These things work like fads. Remember Nerve.com? Peaked in early 2002 at 4x the present level. They're still around, but nobody cares much.
There's a death spiral to these things. When traffic drops off, so does revenue. Then there's a frantic attempt to boost revenue by making the ads more intrusive, usually accompanied by layoffs. This drives away users.
Live by the click, die by the click.
I'm speaking in general however. Social networking is currently dominated by myspace, but once that falls, I don't have a hard time imagining one of the big three taking over.
Anyone offered dot-com style money for what is purely and simply a dot-com business should take it and run. Period.
Just like all the old dot-com bankrupts who no-one ever speaks of these days, facebook (and friends) have no real business model (advertising offers only a pitifully small revenue stream) and no guarentee that someone else isn't going to come along and steal all there users away long before the company starts actually making a profit.
Like the guy's letter says, it is amazing how the dot.com bubble is forming again so soon and looks so identical. I bet it's even the same secretive stockbrokers and equity fund managers making the money before it all crashes again.
"At its height in 1997, the directors of PointCast reportedly spurned an offer of $450 million from News Corp for the company. They hoped to go public for a larger amount, but never did."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast
I had lots of friends on Friendster in '03 Friendster was a beter looking site and the domain name was much catchier I had a few friends on Myspace but Myspace was about 5 times faster. SPEED is such a vital element to the success of any website. Look at Google. Google prided itself on being a search engine with the slimmest, cleanest code. Why did you choose google over any other site?
The other reason why MySpace is popular is because the utility of the service is directly proportional to the number of people on it. I met a co-worker's sister the other day, and that night she sent me a MySpace friend request. I didn't hear anything through Tribe or Orkut because she wasn't on tribe and her brother (whom she found me through) wasn't on Orkut. So now that MySpace is dominant, it's nearly impossible for anyone else to break in. You don't go to another service because it has the features you're looking for, you'd go because all of your friends were on it.
It's like Instant Messaging. Jabber is clearly the superior standard on nearly every axis. But everyone you know is on AIM or Messenger. So you use the service that your friends are on, because the people on the service are the largest feature provided.
The ______ Agenda
Remember Pointcast. At it's height it was valued at over $240 million (this was the mid 90's - that was a lot of money at that time for an Internet company). Now *poof* gone. The founders hung on for the *big* payout only to watch their company die on the vine. Here's a Business Week article from 1999 http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_17/b3626167.ht m that chronicles Pointcast's rise and fall. Take the money and run. Don't be greedy. How many billions of dollars do you really need?
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
I didn't mention Six Degrees because they are so old I doubted many would remember them. Funny that someone pointed this out in an earlier comment.
To me the purchase is just confusing. However, I do agree with the tone of the article. If someone offers you a billion dollars you say thank you and take the money. There just aren't enough Ferraris in the world....
Jon
How are they going to keep compeditors out on the internet especially ones focused on one thing? A lot of search engines got killed by Google, then Google expanded into their other buisnesses. When you have a lot of competing projects angling for resources you get problems. And it only takes 1 good idea to beat a lot of incremental improvements.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Amongst my friends 25 and older, almost everyone still uses Friendster, and logs in at least once a week. Almost noone uses Myspace or Facebook.
Then there's LinkedIn, but that's more for business rather than social networking.
Beneath that age, yes, things seem to reverse themselves...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Does no one remember sixdegrees?
RTFA - it talks about sixdegrees.
It's all about an attempt to buy virtual real estate that cashed-up, gullible teens will be looking at.
Doesn't work very well, of course, but that's never stopped companies throwing away billions.
There's another up and coming contender in this space: think social networking meets del.icio.us-style bookmarking.
Fanpop is a site for fans of anything and everything to find community and content around the stuff they care about by contributing and rating links and discussions.
Whether it be about their favorite TV show like Lost or Grey's Anatomy or their home city like San Francisco or New York, users can find other people who share their passion and discover all kinds of relevant content from videos, blogs, articles and more. Eg, link to the Stanford Spot ( http://www.fanpop.com/spots/stanford-university )
It's at http://www.fanpop.com/
I have no affiliation with the site except as a very satisfied user.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Facebook has something that none of the others ever had: it scales upward. Friendster was interesting at first, but as more and more people joined, it got slower and slower, to the point that it was unbearable. Eventually, people switched to the faster MySpace -- unfortunately, MySpace was only faster because it had less users. Since then, as MySpace has grown, it has gotten much slower, and quite often is unreachable for minutes at a time. I can't remember a point of time that I logged onto MySpace and every feature was working at once (at least _something_ is always down for "maintenance").
From the start, Facebook appeared to be aware of reliability and scalability. The system (seems to be) separated by network (college), making it extremely easy to, say, add a whole new server for a particular college if necessary. While myspace accepted everyone who wanted to join and could fill out a submit form, Facebook added universities as they were able to support the increased load. Now, almost 2 years later, Facebook has opened its doors to the world, and adds features left and right: the only new feature I can recall MySpace adding is putting _videos_ on your myspace (oooh), and being extremely unreliable.
Some restrictions which Facebook uses might be considered "un-fun" by the MySpace crowd (not being allowed to customize their profile as much, restrictions on sign up, etc), but browse the two and notice the difference: Facebook looks consistent across the board, and half the MySpace profiles are unviewable, because people can't be trusted to not be idiots. I recieve friend requests every day on myspace from porn webcam stars and con artists.
In summary, I think Facebook will outlive the set mortality tables for internet phenomenoms, because unlike most web fads, it's not being run into the ground by idiots. Unlike every other social networking group ever, it has yet to annoy the hell out of me.
It strikes me as a bit odd that these social networking sites all seem to be concerned with having massive marketshare, when in reality, they all seem doomed from the start to either finding a comfortable niche, or fading away.
.. just riding the peak of the wave of "trendy" for a little while.
MySpace, Friendster, and the others seem to be aiming to be THE site to use to connect with anybody else out there in the world, for any reason. But the topics and people that interest the teenage crowd are vastly different than the ones that interest, say, retirees or 30-somethings.
It seems like the way to go is to focus on one area where you can shine, and accept the fact that the people not fitting into that demographic probably won't be one of your users. That's what Facebook originally had going for it, but they blew it by opening themselves up to everybody - and I think time will bear out the fact that it diluted their "potency".
MySpace probably should have looked closely at their usage trends, early in the game, and said "Hey - right now, we're mostly drawing the under 25 crowd here!", and re-engineered the site to squarely cater to that demographic. Then, someone like Friendster could have said "Hmm... We need to focus on an area the competition is ignoring. Let's slant our site to an older audience." Instead, I think they got greedy and seeing older users catching on to using their system, they assumed they were "dominating the social networking world". Nope
"...[T]he social network no one talks about anymore." Spend five minutes in an Indonesian/Malaysian/Filipino IRC channel and you'll see how very wrong this statement is.
Liberty in your lifetime
Specifically, it says:
Remember that web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January 2004, called houseSYSTEM - the one I made with the Universal Face Book that pre-dated your site by four months? (You left it out of your speech at Stanford, which is why I ask.) Well, I've re-launched it as CommonRoom (http://www.commonroom.com), and just like its predecessor, it has all sorts of features that might seem familiar: birthday reminders, an event calendar, RSVPs...After all, when you saw all of those features in houseSYSTEM three years ago, you called them "too useful," but I stood by them as valuable.
The open letter isn't advice, it's taking cheap shots because he's pissed off facebook succeeded while his social networking sites all failed.
Friendster is till big here on SE Asia. More people are using Friendster here over other social networking sites that I know of. As if Myspace, Faceook, etc doesn't exists at all.
and getting jumped on by Brazilians for posting in English in a forum marked "Language: English".
Yeah, that fucking pisses me off! It makes me want to start a rumor that Brazil was behind 9/11 so that Bush will fucking nuke Brazil!!!11!!1!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
...so I'd just like to say that whatupbitches.com would be great, if they'd drop their Godawful logo and name. It's like myspace, only uncensored.
BSD: The most efficient way of subsidizing the enemy.
Engineers from the 70/80 created the Interweb thing
Engineers of today created Web 2.0 that doesn't solve any real problem or create better Interweb.
let's all get rich or try dieing with this Web 2.0
sex and drugs
[Seems like a very insightful AC submission right there.]
ISO certified == THX certified
S'funny... .jsp ....
I make a fair amount of money programming in Java, but whenever there's a new and interesting site with ass-poor server response time, I look up at the URL and 2/3 of the time I see the extension
I don't know if it's *poorly written* stuff that's the problem, or what (I mean if they're programming straisght JSP w/o putting the business logic in servlets or using some other framework, that might be an indicator that they took a few shortcuts, but still...)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
From the summary:
A few weeks ago I wrote an open letter to my former friend from school, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, telling him to take Yahoo's money before it's too late. It was meant partly as a joke, and partly as a way to set the record straight on his company's origins, since in financial terms he'll be fine no matter what happens. Now the New York Times has written a story on Friendster, the social network no one talks about anymore. It seems that while history repeats itself every few decades in the global scheme of things, the period of recurrence in Silicon Valley is quite a bit shorter. The moral here: take the billion dollars while you still can."
So we have:
- an open letter saying to take the money and run, implying that the business is not worth the money.
- you call his business: "Friendster, the social network no one talks about anymore"
- in case the letter doesn't drum it in, you add: "The moral here: take the billion dollars while you still can."
- you get it posted to Slashdot.
Ever wonder why he is a "former friend"? My God you're an asshole. Don't ever be my friend, please.
At some level, they're just outsourcing their R&D. Microsoft used this to great effect during the '90s. Need a DBMS? Buy Sybase, repackage it as MSSQLServer, and you're done. Need a web browser? Obtain Mosaic, and you're done. You can grow the product later, but at least you're playing. So, before the buyouts, let the market figure out who the bigger players are, and buy the biggest one still available. Everything else doesn't really matter. There are a couple of things in play here.
1) User base.
There really isn't anything that can't be replicated by the big companies you mentioned. If you think about it, what's YouTube really got to offer? Terabytes of server space? Yawn. Media player technology? Relatively solved problem. Big horkin' bandwidth? Feh.
But, if, as one of the big companies, you develop a new media portal, you don't have the million-odd users that are already on YouTube, and there would be significant costs trying to get your homegrown app to that level. So, partly, they're buying the user base.
2) URL recognition.
Same principle, only applied to the URL, instead of the user base.
I might just be showing my age here, but I'm reminded of a chess saying along the lines of "new lessons are old lessons remembered." I suspect there are significant analogues between "web 2" and "web 1," and Lord knows, the initial models were disproved with a vengeance. YouTube could be compared to broadcast.com, MySpace/social networking to GeoCities (although I'll admit that there is other, more viral, functionality in MySpace). I, at least, just don't get it.
It's worth noting that even at $1.65B, the YouTube buyout is chump change to Google, especially if it's a stock-only deal, which is my understanding. Google's made FAR more than that in stock appreciation, so getting a market leader in that space without actually spending money might make sense. I certainly couldn't justify it, but somebody sold the idea within Google, which is really the only thing that matters.
Innovation happens. What the mega-corporations do to catch up with the innovations is the question. In this business environment, I suspect you cannot tangle with the big guys and win. As a small company, the best you can hope for is a buyout.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Friendster is still one of the best services, even though it is trying to rise form the ashes. Orkut needs to solve the Brazilian problem. Myspace has always been terrible, and the fat wad of cash was a huge stroke of luck. Facebook is the biggest "me too" I have seen in a while and they should take whatever offer they get and run with the money.
Social Networking should be an IP protocol not some jackass website.
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
Somehow I got signed up to Friendster against my will. They allowed someone to register with my email address without email varification when they first started out their service. I marked all of the messages as spam, because I did not sign up for the service. Then I found out after people were sending me messages that were weird that someone was chatting with them online and the replies would go to my address. So I reset the password and had the account deleted because they used my email address in the first place. I get stuff like that from Qads and other sites, I never signed up for. It ticks me off that social networking sites allow people to register with my info without even verifying who they are. I should sue or something. The person who did it, had an IP that traced back to China or some other Asian nation, though, so I am not sure how a lawsuit might take place there.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I personally believe rolling the dice is more fun than always doing the Smart Thing
I roll my dice every night too.
If you are an old school FCer and don't know it yet
all the deliciously psychotic message board traffic from FC has gone to http://bbs.whofailedtoday.com/ .
Check it out!
...but it seems like the submitter has something personal against Facebook, and that should be kept in mind when reading the article.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Yeah, did anyone else notice that this whole 'open letter' deal seems just like a cheap gimmick? It just seems like a really transparent way of trying to push his own new "revolutionary" networking site (which is pretty amateurish, by the way for those of you who haven't taken a look at it).
It wasn't Brazil. It was Kyle.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Anyone else feel like they were reading some component of script from The Apprentice?
This "open letter" is simply a publicity push for the submitters new product. He is riding on the "rise and fall of friendster" to get his complaint on slashdot. Whether the allegations against Zuckerberg are true or not, the submitter obviously didn't have the stronger marketing push or product during their initial releases in their college days. Facebook won. Submitter lost.
I am a Facebook user, and the submitter spammed Facebook with global groups and this same "open letter".
hey guys, do not be so Euro-US centric, Friendster is pretty much the only social network used in Asia, it s a great success here.
i dont think meebo.com is the only one still hanging in there. grupus.com is doing fine too. and i have really got hooked on the latter due to its emphasis on security and closed groups. in fact i sort of miss the spam while on that site
the world is spherical
people can form groups only with people they really know well. and spam is practically non-existent. its model is way better than myspace, orkut and others which have just become spam havens.
Grupus.com
was because the fake hot girl profiles had two important effects: first, it inflated the number of users and bands signed up; secondly, it drew in all the stupid guys who wanted to meet said hot girls. The final homerun was when real hot girls created profiles to attract the attention of the aforementioned stupid guys. Profit! It all goes back to our inherently sexual nature.
Clearly the flaw with all these sites is that they are all gated communities which don't play nicely together. When one starts to wane, you must (if you want to carry on taking part) register on another and re-enter everything. You are also at the mercy of whatever your service provider wants to give you, which basically means the set of features that "those damn kids" want.
Why has no-one yet come up with a good way to do this stuff in a decentralized manner? It doesn't really seem like a very complicated premise: you need a standard way to express information about yourself and your relationships with other people (FOAF?), you need a way to authenticate yourself to others (OpenID?) and then -- and this is the hard part, I think -- you need services built on that infrastructure that can do things like searching for people, finding single people looking for dates, browsing people by interest and stuff like that. In order to bootstrap things, you also need a bunch of easy-to-use services that act like these gated community sites to help users understand what's going on as they make the switch.
I think a decentralized approach would be -- as in most cases -- far better for everyone except the owners of those gated communities.
As someone who knows both of the parties involved, I can tell you that the stories submitter does indeed have a MAJOR grudge against Mark. It's personally motivated. This story is part "pimp my also-ran product" and part "get back at Mark". If the submitter really feels he has something legit against Mark and Friendster, why not just put it out without the veiled innuendo and hash it out?
I don't think it is entirely corporate imperialism (though likely that is a factor).
For example, before Google there was Altavista. Hands up everyone who has used Altavista in the past 5 years. Exactly. Web things are still fickle - you can be the biggest site on the net today, and toast tommorrow. A new search technology comes along and Google could crash and burn if it relied on that alone. Startups are small, fast and can turn on a dime to attract new customers, corporations are like turning supertankers.
Thus, there is a need for corporations to buy up anything that looks promising to minimise threat and to broaden their base if they get serious competition.
Also, it's much cheaper to have R&D effectively outsourced in this manner. Why pay folks to research new technologies when you can wait for something out there to be successful and just snap it up. In some cases it will be cheaper to do this. Though, I doubt that You Tube or Skype were in any way bargains - eBay's share price has still not yet recovered from the Skype purchase.
That said the imperialism thing is the most distasteful factor. My feeling is that most corporations are not so much like Big Brother as like the Roman Empire, long and complex lines of communication, dictatorial delusional madmen in charge, heavily outsourced and dependent on slave labor. All CEO's should have Gibbons as required reading.
They all fall eventually. That's the good news.
You're fired!
And for those of us that didn't know (I didn't):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Imperialism? Let's say I accept your charge. What should the government of our society do about it?
Perhaps, we should compare commonroom.com with facebook.com, and you will see why ThinkComp has a major chip on his shoulder... However, that said, his advice is quite sound. Take your freakin' $100 per use and move on.
;)
That is, unless the guy runs the site because he likes the responsibility, level of power, prestige, or just the satisfaction of working with a job well done and is not really motivated by the money. In which case, what is a good way to buy him out of those other priorities? Perhaps it's roughly 1.5 billion dollars (which is what it took to add some goo to youtube) for the kind-harded founder to become money-grubbing capitalist. Because we know that is probably the difference between being on the Forbes 400 next year or not...
These hordes of eyeballs are becoming increasingly restless online, so don't expect the hordes to stay put 2+ years at most of your online properties/palaces. Unless if you're Google, whereby you've had people who have come back home (google.com) for 3-5 years now and where your form of subtle advertising of other services seems to be doing it...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
They need someone to come along and give them the stick. The whole carrot thing is overrated.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Uh, I think you're mistaken here: Facebook != Friendster. He's using Friendster as a cautionary tale, not dissing his alleged former friend's business, Facebook.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
mySpace is infested with worthless bots regardless of group size. That's a fact.