Friendster Back from the Dead? 91
garzpacho writes "With a fresh infusion of $10 million in funding, Friendster is making a bid to rejoin the social networking A-list. The cash, from VC firm DAG Ventures, accompanies plans for a complete project redesign, a focus on adult users and a newly awarded patent for social networking. A real comeback might be unlikely, though: 'Turnaround stories for companies that draw on advanced Web technology known collectively as Web 2.0 remain unprecedented, says David Sze, a general partner at Greylock who specializes in consumer Internet companies but does not invest in Friendster. Still, Sze says Friendster doesn't need to have a MySpace-size traffic explosion to turn a profit. Says Sze in an e-mail, 'If those users are reasonably valuable and monetizable, I think [investors] can make money on their investment.''"
Yeah, but (Score:2)
Friendster.. I remember them. (Score:3, Funny)
Please come back. Please. We miss you. Please.. (Score:4, Funny)
I still have an account on there. I really like their birthday reminders
I get a kick out of Friendster because I get emails saying I haven't logged in "in a while" and how great it would be if I logged in. Friends get the same emails, and we all ignore them, because friendster had/has nothing to offer beyond a popularity contest. I grew out of worrying how MANY friends I had years ago.
We agreed it was like a desperate ex...popping up every once in a while, telling you how nice it'd be to hear from you...
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Judging from your UID, that would have been 3 or 4 years ago then?
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He could have a bazillion friends on a social networking site, and put the horde to good use. Perhaps by telling them to all vote independent next elections
Windows 3.1 making a comeback as well (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBNBQRXvkps [youtube.com]
(This is a joke)
Don't knock Windows 3.1 (Score:2)
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oi! (Score:1)
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Friendster making a comback... (Score:2)
They're going to have a hard time (Score:1)
They're going to have to do something different and unique to get noticed, otherwise they have a snowball's chance in hell of making it work.
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Don't forget about adding a 'beta' to the end of the name as well. Also, integrating an AJAX-driven GUI will help them incentivize dynamic value from their resulting rss-driven communities.
(thanks to the Web 2.0 bullshit generator [emptybottle.org])
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In 2006 AD, social network war was beginning.
Friendster: We get signal, main screen turn on.
MySpace: How are you gentlemen! All your friend are belong to us!
What you say!? (Score:2)
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Typically, I would think this was a grammatical error of some sort, but around slashdot I tend to think you're probably correct.
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I get invites from retards all over the place that I meet, for myspace, bebo, ringo, hi5, all that useless crap. Then eventually poor sods like me sign up accounts hoping the invites go away. Then you just get spammed da
Blah. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blah. (Score:4, Insightful)
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"There's a sucker born every minute, and apparently some of those suckers are too young to remember the 90s."
Trouble is, some of those suckers made lots and lots of money.
Yahoo! and Fox are apparently satisfied with their purchases of Flickr and MySpace. Sometimes it's a win-win.
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Between the lines: (Score:4, Insightful)
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If we're going on the assumption that *any* software is patentable (I don't believe this, but the courts do, so that's where we are) then web software in particular is problematic. Where does software design end and business plan begin? Friendster seems as close as web software gets to the 19th century idea of "by twiddling this pressure valve my mill is 80% more efficient" patent. There might be precedents, obviously other sites have allowed users to make conn
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MySpace (Score:1)
I see this comeback being about as successful as the Napseter comeback.
Lack of interest. (Score:3, Interesting)
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How long until? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully, someone will come out with some kind of meta-network that lets me join each network and keeps up-to-date a basic compatibility (e.g., like GAIM and Trillian do for IM).
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I've actually been working on just that. An open source social networking project that's distributed, called Appleseed [sourceforge.net].
We have two test sites, and we're just starting to get into the distributed part (single sign-ons, cross-site communication, P2P searches, etc).
People Aggregator (Score:2)
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Anyone want to make a real-time strategy game out of this?
Make money?How? (Score:1)
How exactly are they going to make money?
With those googleads like ads they got there??
http://www.friendster.com/ [friendster.com]
Friendster is great, but (Score:4, Interesting)
I think they're doomed.
OpenDNS issues (Score:1)
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That's the first time I've seen any trouble with open dns.
It's possible... (Score:1)
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Mot much of a chance (Score:2)
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I don't think so.
Personally I think the move is right (and I had been advocating it informally for some time). Friendster should concentrate on "adults" (AKA 25+) as MySpace is quite the annoying kid-world sometimes; and furthermore, is so addled with marketing that older people would be frankly turned off by it. Not to mention if they don't focus on being THE site, they avoid the quite obvious traffic and scalability issues MySpace is constantly plagued with.
I applaud the move and it makes sense. I
Jobs (Score:2)
Friendster *can* buy popularity. (Score:2)
hyperventilating over patents (Score:1)
I can't wait... (Score:1)
Unfortunately, something even more lame and stupid will probably replace it...
Sigh.
Note to Self: (Score:2)
That reminds me -- I need to delete my Friendster account.
I shouldn't be hesitant about it; after all, Friendster has done exactly zilch for me. But I worry that my dropping out might negatively impact, even a little bit, the social networks of my friends, particularly those who joined at my invitation. Still, I cannot abide that my social network is being used to further
Web 2.0 Garbage (Score:1)
Humph! They added AJAX controls to the frontpage, added vids, blogs, blah, blah - not impressed.
Just because it used AJAX, ATLAS, .NET 2.0 or any of the "new" technologies doesn't mean anything. It's still going to be bottom-barrel internet fodder. The idea of social networking and reputation driven sites have been around for ages (look at /.)
The question then is this: do social networking communities or even reputation servers in the longrun do anything for anyone, except in small specialized communit
a new social network site (Score:1, Offtopic)
Here is the About Us [zoji.com] page. He considers it really "pre-launch" sti
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Imagine ... (Score:1)
Wanna compete with myspace? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Quit having unexpected errors every 10 minutes
2. Actual search functions that allow exact matches, etc. Not a fake search engine that returns everything.
3. No huge influx of Brazilian users
4. Don't allow customization of pages to the point of saturating a T1 connection upon viewing.
5. Actual active moderators(in message boards, etc).
6. No spyware-deploying ads.
7. No private profiles. No purpose of a private profile on a social networking site.
8. No orkut-like invite system. No new user filtration like facebook has.
9. And the big one: no spambots allowed. Captchas, ACTIVE IP banning, and numerous other defenses. Myspace is losing the war on this.
If Friendster can set a solid ground with doing the above, maybe they can get some converts from those who are tired of myspace's problems.
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I agreed with all of your other points but there is actually a VERY valid reason for private profiles. To explain by example I present the following:
My best friends girlfriend is very beautiful, all around amazing girl that guys go nuts over. Literally. One of our EX-friends from highschool started stalking her and tried to add her as a friend on MySpace. She didn't like the idea of him looking at pics of her or commun
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Colbert Report Reference (Score:1)
It's all about the patents (Score:2)
The stuff about "resurrecting" Friendster seems to be more of a PR move. They'll try to compete, but pretty soon, they'll claim they can't compete because other sites have stolen their patented ideas. Then Friendster can sue these sites and claim even more damage.
Greylock comments (Score:2)