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!
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!
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
Jumping the shark doesn't imply that it's dead, just that it's passed its peak. There's been a significant amount of protest recently over changes they've made, and they're starting to alienate the early adopters, etc. Suggesting that the site may be slowing down.
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
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
Instead, I think MyBubble is quite different than BuyBubble the first time around. As I see it, Bubble 1.0 was all about "Can we trade StoreFront rent (Location, Location, Location = expensive) into our profit margin?" A 1.0 site stocked a warehouse say in three funky locations where space is cheap, then DropShipped stuff to customers ordering remotely.
... and croaked gloriously. At least Bubble 1.0 was simply a spin on the usual retail mechanics. When they traded the localization of customers, they landed into the globalization of competitors.
Problem developed, only the small (5%-ish?) experts made it work, a huge swath "spent little, did little", and the remainder spent gloriously
MyBubble sites start by trying to collect people doing NonCommercial activities. Eyeballs appear, and advertisers present things to eyeballs. However, the success rate might be even lower this time around! I think I'm reading that these sites have smaller Ops budgets, so they might be able to die whimpering rather than erupting.
If I recall my history theory correctly, the word that's becoming relevant is Oligarchy. "Rule by the Few". Okay, So Microsoft is not quite a *Monopoly*. However, noting I said "Rule" and not quite "Own", Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and your choice of an industrial back end OS DO Rule the computing world. Apple's iPod, SanDisk, Creative, and your choice of a couple more own the Mp3 market. I'm less versed on the names, but the gaming market is down to 5 players or less. *together*, Yahoo, Google, and your choice of #'s 3 & 4 own the search world.
Let's suppose MyBubble quietly loses air, the Big Players parcel everything among themselves, and everything settles into a plateau. I can't see ANY other models at all! Does anyone know? However fake, I recall the pseudo excitement of 1999. After everything shakes out in a few years, I forecast a vast DULL expanse that feels like it has the potential to go into PermaStasis for decades. (Allowance made for your choice of three minor blips: BioTech, Silicon Intelligence, and a guest third.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If the goal of the last bubble was to go public, the goal of the new bubble is to be purchased by Microsoft, Yahoo, or Google.
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.
The new dot-com business are like donkeys chasing a carrot on a stick. They just keep on walking, never getting any closer to the carrot, but expending a lot of energy (money). They need some company to come along and give them the carrot.
I call this "The Paul Graham Business Plan".
Talking about the protest and "alienating early adopters" shows your disconnection. The protest brought people _back_ to Facebook. People had stopped using it, heard about the feed, went to look and realized it was actually a good thing.
I don't think you understand how huge Facebook is. If you are at _any_ college or university in the United States, 95+% of the people you know there are on Facebook. This isn't MySpace where techie people snub it for it's simplicity and general silliness. Their market share of that demographic is probably higher than that of MSIE at it's absolute peak.
The article says that the demographic group has no purchasing power...and he doesn't know what he's talking about. Go count iPods on campus. Go count graphic tees. Count cars in the parking lot. See if you can estimate alcohol consumption (tip: double whatever estimate you came up with). There's not a lot of money in this group, but it is spent very largely in ways that are very interesting to corporations.
Beyond pure purchasing power, try to imagine the power of the _network_. If you try to treat Facebook as a website and advertise in that way, then you've already lost. The power of Facebook is the fact that these 9 million people are interconnected and all reflect on each other.
For example: if you advertise by measuring the number of views an ad gets, you've lost. What you want to do is split up the users into groups. One set of divisions would identify placement within the social structure: two levels of trend-starters and a couple levels of late-adopters. Thanks to the wealth of information, this can be done based on movies, tv shows, books, quotes, clubs, etc, if Facebook watches how these things spread through profiles. Find out who starts the groups that everyone joins.
Another way would be to divide groups such that each social cluster is split into 4-5 equal groups. That way, advertisers can hit each social cluster for a week. The buzz about their product will continue, but they won't be wasting money hitting the same people over and over until they just ignore the ad.
And saying that Facebook is being offered $100 per user is a rather ridiculous measurement. A great part of Facebook's strength comes from it's constant renewal: It's so ubiquitous that all incoming freshman sign up as soon as they hear about it. Bam! there's another million users, each year, growing the network.
Mark Zuck. is right not to sell, IMO. There is no way to tell what will happen to the company once it is out of his hands. Not selling, to me, shows that he's realized that he's probably got enough money to last him for life, and that he's now more interested in protecting his project and maintaining a site that the college student in him would want to use.
What you need is some context...
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.
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.