Friendster's Rise and Fall
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Oct 15, 2006 07:15 PM
from the if-money-then-take-if-take-then-run dept.
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."
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sixdegrees (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
FIDO was social n
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:sixdegrees (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly, the Sixdegrees name and logo are still in use [sixdegrees.com] by some new site.
Link to article that doesn't require subscription (Score:4, Informative)
http://news.com.com/Wallflower+at+the+Web+party/2
RTFA (Score:3, Funny)
Does no one remember sixdegrees?
RTFA - it talks about sixdegrees.
Re:sixdegrees (Score:5, Funny)
Friendster is the one is Asia !! (Score:4, Informative)
It's not the only little-known network (Score:5, Interesting)
Friendster isn't the only network being overshadowed by MySpace. There's also Orkut [orkut.com] and the exceedingly lame Hi5 [slashdot.org], 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.
You only want / need one (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You only want / need one (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Decentralization is needed (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:It's not the only little-known network (Score:5, Interesting)
FaceBook (Score:4, Insightful)
They were smart though. Advertising was part of FaceBook from the beginning & it isn't overly intrusive.
Authors are disconnected (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Authors are disconnected (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Authors are disconnected (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Authors are disconnected (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:FaceBook (Score:4, Interesting)
The user experience on Facebook has changed by literally zero since it opened it up to everyone. The privacy settings are very robust. You still need a school or work e-mail address to join a school or work network. Basically, if you hadn't told me and the circle of friends I have on Facebook that it was opening up to a broader audience, none of us would have noticed. College kids got on board the bandwagon complaining about opening it up to everyone without knowing the facts: surprise, surprise. Another huge surprise is that most of them are still using it. The hype might've brought Facebook down, but it's moved beyond the crisis zone now and apathy won out in their favor.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's right, sell that hot air, (Score:2)
MySpace's fall (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MySpace's fall (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MySpace's fall (Score:5, Funny)
Can anyone name a fad that remained popular with teenagers for over a year?
Oral Sex?
Re:MySpace's fall (Score:4, Funny)
Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft = Oceana, East Asia.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft = Oceana, East Asi (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft = Oceana, East Asi (Score:2)
Profit (Score:2, Funny)
3. Get overshadowed by copycat
4. Slowly fade out of existence
5. Profit!
Err... wait...
Eh, there's no real "loser" in either scenario... (Score:4, Interesting)
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. :) )
Remember Tribe? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [alexa.com] 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 [alexa.com] 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.
dot.com bubble 2.0 (Score:2)
Just like all the old dot-com bankrupts who no-one ever speaks of these days, facebook (and friends) have no real business model (advertising
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:dot.com bubble 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
One word: Pointcast (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast [wikipedia.org]
I remember Friendster's flaw (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
*dies*
And let's not forget Pointcast... (Score:5, Interesting)
Like the Club Scene (Score:2, Insightful)
Friendster is still pretty alive and well (Score:2)
Then there's LinkedIn, but that's more for business rather than social networking.
Beneath that age, yes, things
Is there no middle ground? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
The 'open letter' is just from a bitter failure .. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
With friends like you... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Friendster scams (Score:3)