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."
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.
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.
I sure do... I was on it a few times over. SixDegrees made two fatal mistakes: (1) assuming that a person has exactly one e-mail address (so I'd have several different friends with the same name) and (2) having absolutely no business plan for turning relationship knowledge into cash. Most social networking sites also fail at (2) as well.
Oddly, the Sixdegrees name and logo are still in use by some new site.
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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.
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.
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
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.
It would be nice to see Myspace put out.
They are constantly having reliability issues....and their security sucks. The fact that you can insert java script into a message that brings someone to a fishing page is rediculous.
And they also don't even attempt to verify that a person is a person (unlike facebook which uses an EDU email --OR-- a mobile phone text message). Someone this past week setup a fake account (of whom I have no idea who it was), put many a sentances speaking many false and offensive statements about me using my full name, and then invited my whole friends list to become their friend. You can't easily do this on some of the other services; and to make it worse, when asking Myspace to take it down, when its clearly a fake account, they don't do anything.
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