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."

Comments

Re:You only want / need one

[shaneh0]

I really love this post.

The crux of this argument, is that someone teased the OP, and horrible MySpace didn't even try to prevent such a thing from happening!

Here's a clue:

The reason MySpace flourished, leaving FaceBook et al in their wake, is that MySpace took a hands-off approach. This same unrestricted, hands-off style has spawned successful financial markets, communities, and entire economies. It's really amazing to see what happens when you just let go of something and let it grow organically.

Which really makes MySpace a much better reflection of life than Facebook or anything else. People aren't authenticated in (real life) social networks. Comments aren't filtered by a moderator. Bad people are dealt with by market forces: if you're a bad person, you don't have friends. MySpace works the same way.

So, what happened was, you got teased by somebody, your friends laughed, and you ran to the teacher and told. Much to your dismay, the teacher didn't scold the bad kid for making fun of you, and decided instead to let the community (like the market) police and adjust itself.

It strikes me that you're the type of guy who is happy to be removed from the ruthlessness of open social networks like High School and, to some extent, College. You seek order in your social network. Unfortunately, order goes against the model of these things. Therefore, the act of applying order reduces the energy in the social network, making it less like a spontaneous living thing and more like a web-app backed by database of nicknames, profiles and pictures.

Slashdot loves to deride MySpace. My personal belief, is that stems from MySpace being like high school, and we all know how much nerdy progrmamer types L-O-V-E-D high school. People post about how horrible the skins are, how rediculous the comments, how stupid the technology, how annoying the music, how useless the profile questions, how trivial the blogs. And they make moronic conclusions like 'MySpace users must like things that are unreadable.'

Unfortunately for these people, there are lots of us who aren't self-conscience introverts. Above all, we enjoy EXPRESSING OURSELVES. And we enjoy sharing in the ways that our friends express their selves. "readability" isn't the most important thing about a Myspace. In fact, if you were to stack rank them, I'd guess readability to be, maybe, in the top 50 most important things about a myspace. There isn't volumes of text to read. On blog pages, where there is a lot of text, skins aren't used.

As much as I personally hate it, the usual basement-dwelling, final-fantasy-playing, non-showering, black t-shirt wearing stereotype of slashdot users is glaringly reinforced whenever MySpace is brought up.

I understand that most myspace pages fail to implement the IGeek interface. That causes problems for the usualy /. types. But if you look inside yourself to your inner CPerson base class, maybe you'll see the appeal that the site has to its millions of users.

All that being said, I, personally don't have a myspace. My reasons are simple: I spend enough time on the PC at work, I don't need to use it for socializing after work. I find the cell phone, text messages, and a local bar to be a better fit for my life.