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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."

5 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. It's not the only little-known network by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:It's not the only little-known network by aikizensurfer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It depends on how you define "failure" Actually friendster is alive and well in Asia especially in the Philippines. It's actually expanded it's market demographic here to include not only young teens and college students, but also 30 somethings who are trying to re-connect with old aquaintances. It's also functioning as a de facto craig's list which is actually makes sense since you are able to get a better perspective of the poster, aside from just a email address. That being said, it is showing it's age by not having the additional functionality of say a mutliply or yahoo 360. The thing is that there is a minimal North American market for it anymore, so that is why the US press regards it as a "failure". Personally though, if i was in their position at that time, I would have" taken the money and ran " :)

  2. And let's not forget Pointcast... by bangzilla · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. Is there no middle ground? by King_TJ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 .. just riding the peak of the wave of "trendy" for a little while.

  4. The 'open letter' is just from a bitter failure .. by neomage86 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.