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Friendster's Rise and Fall

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the if-money-then-take-if-take-then-run dept.

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."

7 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Firefly, WELL, USENET by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.)

  2. Re:MySpace's fall by zamboni1138 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Dangerous car driving.

  3. Re:Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft = Oceana, East Asi by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Authors are disconnected by Seoulstriker · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  5. Link to article that doesn't require subscription by mthreat · · Score: 4, Informative

    No subscription required to read the article here:

    http://news.com.com/Wallflower+at+the+Web+party/21 00-1030_3-6125999.html

  6. Re:It's not the only little-known network by j3tt · · Score: 2, Informative

    you're probably from the Philippines just like me.

    To add to aikizensurfer's post .... what's interesting is that they've added (via third parties?) add on services such as Classifieds (payable via the local telcos payment through SMS), and flower delivery. I don't know though if these features are also offered elsewhere.

    A lot of folks here are on Friendster. I always get a kick out of chatting with somebody from the Yahoo chatrooms (yes, Yahoo is the popular IM client here) and then pretending I know them by searching their Yahoo ids (appended with @yahoo.com) to find their real identities in Friendster.

  7. Friendster is the one is Asia !! by fredouil · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.