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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.