Friendster's Rise and Fall 215
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."
sixdegrees (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
FIDO was social networking back in the day. And it was real networking too.
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)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Jabber is clearly the superior standard on nearly every axis. But everyone you know is on AIM or Messenger.
Nobody I know is on AIM (I don't live in the US). Quite a few people I know are on Google Talk, which is basically Jabber. How did Google get people to actually use its messaging service? By integrating it with their email: you can see from your mail window in your web browser which contacts are online, and message them directly from the browser. Clever.
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:2)
Facebook's mobile phone verification, while good in execution, has a pretty bad vulnerability. Because they don't know how long an SMS will take to deliver, nor do they want to lock out users until the message comes through, they provide a period of one month in which you can create an account without verifying your humanness.
This means that anyone - including a s
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, kinda like spam, viruses, and spyware.
Real life social networks *are* authenticated, to a certain degree; networks are comprised of workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, etc, all places that oftentimes require an 'in' (be it getting hired, moving into
Re: (Score:2)
MySpace - the Internet for people who won't be going
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot rants about Myspace all boil down to this:
The cool kids with friends are on myspace. We hate them. We're supposed to be so much better and more successful now that high school is over, but we're still the same geeks we've always been. I hate teh cool kids. And football sucks, too! Call me in 3 days, I have to go to my basement and install debian on my NeoPet.
Puh-leese.
Re: (Score:2)
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 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
Re: (Score:2)
That's probably where Google has been really smart. Maybe they realised this fact and that's why they integrated gchat into gmail. Lost of people have gmail accounts but they probably never used gchat until it was integrated into gmail.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It's not the only little-known network (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
To add to aikizensurfer's post
A lot of folks here are on Friendster. I always get a kick out of chatting with somebody from the Yahoo chatrooms (yes, Yahoo is the popular IM client here) and then pretending I know them b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My own suspicion is that myspace succeeded primarily by targetting itself as a marketing medium for bands. The first hundred times I went to MySpace were to reference a band. I think this sucked a lot of people in (like myself) who have no interest in social networking per se. Of course, I do value the social networki
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
Logical leap here - is this number greater than the estimated million users who /left/ as a result of this?
Re:Authors are disconnected (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's more than a little optimistic of you to think that the girl who is hitting up the guy on Facebook who is already a geek about whether he's done the homework for tomorrow is doing so so she can share her answers with him in the event he hasn't...
We
Re: (Score:2)
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:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
What?
Re:MySpace's fall (Score:5, Funny)
Can anyone name a fad that remained popular with teenagers for over a year?
Oral Sex?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Quite likely. My sister became a born-again Christian, most likely because my parents were non-conformist, and she thought it was "weird." Actually, most kids seem quite conservative and conformist these days.
Re: (Score:2)
You should come to the UK and describe the kids here as that. You would probably get to conser... right before the house brick hit you.
Re:MySpace's fall (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That being said, I feel like MySpace has become the KMart of the internet, and by that I mean the quality of peo
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sex drugs and rock n' roll!
Re: (Score:2)
Of course not...
Then it wouldn't be a fad.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft = Oceana, East Asi (Score:2)
Well, yes, but... (Score:2)
1) User ba
Re:Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft = Oceana, East Asi (Score:2)
For example, before Google there was Altavista. Hands up everyone who has used Altavista in the past 5 years. Exactly. Web things are still fickle - you can be the biggest site on the net today, and toast tommorrow. A new search technology comes along and Google could crash and burn if it relied on that alone. Startups are small, fast and can turn on a dime to attract new customers, corporations are like turning supertank
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You got a cite for this, or are you confusing Tribe with MySpace?
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 offers only a pitifully small revenue stream) and no guarentee that someone else isn't going to come along and steal all there users away long before the company starts actually making a profit.
Like the guy's letter says, it is amazing how the dot.com bub
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem developed, only the small (5%-ish?) experts made it work, a huge swath "spent little, did little", and the remainder spent gloriously
Re: (Score:2)
That's ok. I can make money on the way down, too.
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.
No, no, no (Score:2)
One word: Pointcast (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast [wikipedia.org]
I remember Friendster's flaw (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Even with Google's speed, another search engine could overtake it if a new search technology could be developed. Ad farms have made Google significantly less useful, and since google now primarily serves ads, i does not seem to be that concerned about search beyond what is necessary to drive the ads. OTOH, the barriers to entry are much great
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And let's not forget Pointcast... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you have bigger plans [xprize.org] for the money? Anousheh isn't the only one spending buyout dollars on modern philanthropy.
Like the Club Scene (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that the switching costs are so low I don't know how much it matters. All it takes is one leading group of folks to switch over together to a new social networking site and eventually others will follow. And - well, you don't even have to switch, you can just create
Re: (Score:2)
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 seem to reverse themselves...
Another up and coming contender: FanPop (Score:2, Insightful)
Fanpop is a site for fans of anything and everything to find community and content around the stuff they care about by contributing and rating links and discussions.
Whether it be about their favorite TV show like Lost or Grey's Anatomy or their home city like San Francisco or New York, users can find other people who share their passion and discover all kinds of relevant content from videos, bl
It's all about scalability (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
JSP, bleh (Score:2)
I make a fair amount of money programming in Java, but whenever there's a new and interesting site with ass-poor server response time, I look up at the URL and 2/3 of the time I see the extension
I don't know if it's *poorly written* stuff that's the problem, or what (I mean if they're programming straisght JSP w/o putting the business logic in servlets or using some other framework, that might be an indicator that they took a few shortcuts, but still...)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
From the sounds of it he may have been in some was associated with MZ at some point, maybe felt he was cheated out of something, and is taking revenge.
Guaranteed they have not been "friends" for some time, possibly never. MZ is probably completely pissed at him.
Or he is working for someone who is looking to make a bid, so they are attempti
Friendster scams (Score:3)
Not to be a cynic or anything... (Score:2)
subversive promotion (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a Facebook user, and the submitter spammed Facebook with global groups and this same "open letter".
major chip on shoulder alert (Score:2)
That is, unless the guy runs the site because he likes the responsibility, level of power, prestige, or just the satisfaction of working with a job well done and is not really motivated by the money. In which case, what is a good way to buy him out of those other priorities? Perhaps it
Re: (Score:2)
Sure it does
if(money)
take = true;
if(take)
run();