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!
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.
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
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.
3. Get overshadowed by copycat
4. Slowly fade out of existence
5. Profit!
Err... wait...
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
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.
That's life -- sometimes you need to roll the dice to see what happens. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I personally believe rolling the dice is more fun than always doing the Smart Thing (note: really should be called doing the Average Thing since the Smart Thing seems to be defined as doing what everyone else would do). Unless you're talking about life and death situations, it's really no Big Deal. Silly online networking sites definitely don't count as Big Deals. :)
(Aside: I personally don't believe in "winning" and "losing" when it comes to stuff like this. There's only learning. Anyway, I'll get off my philosophical high horse. :) )
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.
No subscription required to read the article here:
1 00-1030_3-6125999.html
http://news.com.com/Wallflower+at+the+Web+party/2
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.
"At its height in 1997, the directors of PointCast reportedly spurned an offer of $450 million from News Corp for the company. They hoped to go public for a larger amount, but never did."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast
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
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.
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
Does no one remember sixdegrees?
RTFA - it talks about sixdegrees.
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.
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.
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
Didn't that show get canceled?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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.
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.
Somehow I got signed up to Friendster against my will. They allowed someone to register with my email address without email varification when they first started out their service. I marked all of the messages as spam, because I did not sign up for the service. Then I found out after people were sending me messages that were weird that someone was chatting with them online and the replies would go to my address. So I reset the password and had the account deleted because they used my email address in the first place. I get stuff like that from Qads and other sites, I never signed up for. It ticks me off that social networking sites allow people to register with my info without even verifying who they are. I should sue or something. The person who did it, had an IP that traced back to China or some other Asian nation, though, so I am not sure how a lawsuit might take place there.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This "open letter" is simply a publicity push for the submitters new product. He is riding on the "rise and fall of friendster" to get his complaint on slashdot. Whether the allegations against Zuckerberg are true or not, the submitter obviously didn't have the stronger marketing push or product during their initial releases in their college days. Facebook won. Submitter lost.
I am a Facebook user, and the submitter spammed Facebook with global groups and this same "open letter".
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.
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.