Embattled social networking site Friendster, with an impressive group of investors that includes Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, BenchMark Capital and Battery Ventures, has not been able to keep up with competitors. Even so, not many companies can claim to have John Doerr, Bob Kagle, Jeffrey Katz, Tim Koogle and Roger Lee on their board.
It is a poorly kept secret that Friendster has been searching for an aquiror for some time, although obviously no one has yet stepped up the the altar.
The rumor floating around over the last week, which I’ve heard from multiple sources close to Kleiner Perkins, is that the fund has stepped in to stop a shutdown. They have injected limited additional funds (I’ve heard numbers between $5 million and $12 million) and have restructured the capitalization of the company to heavily favor their fund (this would be customary in a recapitalization). No reports as to whether BenchMark or Battery were also involved, or whether the current executive team will be looking for new jobs.
Update: More rumors, that the round was done at a $3m pre-money valuation. This is not a healthy company.
Thought I’d give the site a look after this post. I guess they need the money but their on site advertising is amazingly intrusive. The first page proper I got to made a big pop up appear in the middle of the screen.
It’s a bit like having a man with a sandwich board in the cupboard under the stairs. Faced with advertising so ‘in your face’ you probably wouldn’t go there again.
I haven’t been able to get to the vacuum cleaner for months….
Everyone is on MySpace
I don’t think there is anything Friendster can do to get back in the game. They are considered “uncool” now and that is hard, if not impossible, to overcome.
I still could not confirm if news of Friendster founder Jonathan Abram’s new gig, Socializr is true.. or was it just a prank as I suspect.
sounds to me like too little too late. amazon should buy them up for a couple mil, and let their engineers do whatever they want with it.
make it an expensive experiment.
Friendster would need a complete revamp in order to try to make a comeback. Aside from the annoying ad’s, the tried too hard to implement all of their extra features to be competitive. Their design is simple unbearable now with all the clutter.
Myspace on the other end, needs to get with it. No one bothered to make sure they were scalable, because it is slow, buggy, and has grown too big for it’s britches.
The thing with these kinds of sites is that it’s all about who’s on them… I use myspace to find old friends from highschool etc. because theres a good chance they will be on there due to it’s popularity. Myspace is starting to suck though, last time I signed in it went to a page that was nothing but an ad that you have to click “skip” to get past. What an annoying pain in the ass. Friendster probably won’t make a comeback unless myspace hands it to them which it seems to be considering.
‘not many companies can claim to have John Doerr, Bob Kagle, Jeffrey Katz, Tim Koogle and Roger Lee on their board.’
Looks like that may be the problem, not the solution. Too many cooks …
if myspace does not improve its site Tagworld will probably get big. I currently use myspace because all my friends are on it but i don’t like it at all. They have a bug in their “search through your own buddy list” from last year that never was fixed. And half the time i want to log in, i can’t.
Agree with the above comments – it appears that both Friendster and MySpace were poorly engineered. MySpace broke in the first 5 minutes after I signed up, and Friendster is horribly slow and cluttered.
Unfortunately I don’t think social networking sites like these are sustainable. After the initial thrill of signing up and adding some new friends, I bet most users just check it briefly once a day, and don’t browse enough to make use of an ad network. The only real value is entertainment, and that quickly wears off.
frienster = R.I.P.
what i can’t believe is that these VCs will fork over 10+ mill to a dead entity without blinking. how many great startups out there could use that money?
the problem with friendster is that it is no longer cool. sites like myspace, xanga, hi5, linkIn, etc, etc, have better features and more members.
the coffee shop down the road can’t slap on a new coat of paint and expect new customers. are these VCs actually paying 10+ mill for the name, planning to gut the kitchen and start new?
It’s a prelude to the SN bubble burst, with no clear focus which target audience.
Surprising to find BV on the list.
I have to disagree with Andrew. Social networking sites are for real. I know TONS of people who check their myspace EVERY day. I even have friends who will spend hours on it. Whether the VCS start over with Friendster and are able to regain popularity, MySpace fixes their bug problems, or TagWorld can catch on, someone will be very rich.
Um, I kind of LIKE Friendster. They’ve got a lot of work though.
MySpace is really a teen site. Being over 25 on MySpace (I’ll admit it, I’m both) feels weird.
I’d love to see a “what Friendster should do now” list, like Michael’s great “Products I’d like to Cover” list.
Although they have gone through a revamp and started censoring, I think Tibe.net is the best social networking site, but not from a mass market perspective. It just has smarter users on it, but not nearly as many as MySpace.
long live tribe
Social networking sites seems to either be about utility (find jobs, find dates, find a plumber) or wasting time (find people you don’t know to say random things to). The ones w/utility will develop user pops in direct relation to the size of the problem they solve. The ones about wasting time will come and go with the tides of fashion/hipness – Friendster, MySpace, door number 3.
Thumbs down for Friendster..
GROU.PS is far from being mature but it is my new favourite in social networking sites..
Maybe they should rename themselves “Friend.st.er” so they can be cool like a Web 2.0 firm?
does the fact that myspace is “music oriented” even matter? i use their site, not every day (i know some who visit 2-3x a day), but i could care less about the music function… i think their popularity lies in their flexibility.
I’d like to see Friendster make an API for other sites to determine the distance between Person A and Person B.
Like Craigslist or review sites could show you content by people in your Friendster (and hopefully other) network(s). Friendster could charge for this and make real money, even if they never sign up another user.
Why are Yelp and InsiderPages trying to boil the ocean when history shows things get de-coupled?
Meanwhile, in contrast to a lot of these centralized sites like Friendster, Tribe etc., take a look at the growing XFN (XHTML Friends Network: http://gmpg.org/xfn/ ) distributed social network.
David Berlind made the prediction of a transition to XFN in “Will social databases give way to social protocols?” [ http://blogs.zd.../index.php?p=30 ], and Google’s recent Markup Study found that XFN was “the most popular HTML metadata profile! [ http://code.goo...ageheaders.html ]
Anybody with a site/blog/etc. can join [ http://gmpg.org/xfn/join ] XFN, and the easiest way is to start a Wordpress.com blog (which comes with XFN support built-in) and add your friends and contacts to your blogroll.
However the biggest strength of XFN is that there are already thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of sites that are connected in the XHTML Friends Network and it doesn’t matter if any one site goes away, unlike centralized sites which all share this weakness (years ago SixDegrees.com disappeared without a trace, will Friendster follow suit in a few months or year or two?).
As far as functionality, I think that long term success depends on how well the design produces a sense of community. These site focus on the client getting their friends to sign up so they can commune, and so the site gets clients to do their advertising for them. Then they focus on trying to keep you on your computer and on the site.
But community will flourish if you can get people together more. For that, you beef up your subject groups, and localized events areas. Craigslist is popular without all the bells and whistles of beautiful design or annoying popups, I think, precisely because it focuses on localities and giving people what they need to walk away from the computer and into friendship.
I only started looking into on-line friendship sites because a co-worker said he could go on craigslist and say he was going to go to this cafe in a few hours and wanted to know if anyone wanted to meet and chat for a while over a cup of coffee. He’d get a response in a 20 minutes or so, they’d check out each others’ profile and say okay. I thought, great! Tai chi in the park anyone? How about open mic night? What’s the best chinese food around here?
Make a site like that and I’ll pay monthly and sign on daily.
The fact is..that most Americans or Europeans are the ones who use Myspace. Friendster users are mostly Asians. I’v heard a most of my friends say that Myspace is so complicated and cluttered…then there are my other friends who say that Friendster is so cluttered and slow..depends on who’s using which social network. I’ve only got five friends who use Myspace..and they hardly even use it coz they say Friendster is better. Most of my friends use Friendster..and so do I. All my highschool classmates use friendster…that’s why it’s so damn cool..
and if you say it’s cluttered..so what..the main thing is.. 
I get to talk to my friends and get socialize with them…damn..Friendster is gonna last.. 
Friendster is big here (Philippines) – see Wired News, We’re a Hit in Manila! Now What? They bought a local company and are building an a system.
I use Friendster to keep in touch with my friends and family in the Philippines because they all use it. I live in Australia and many of my friends have never even heard of Friendster and this is the first time I’ve used it. I just hope that Friendster is able to hang in there.. MABUHAY FRIENDSTER!
我想和你交个朋友 哥们儿关系的那种啊 很铁的哦 放心 我一定支持你
对了 我的QQ号是353051662 加我把 哥们儿
Were do i find some new MS layouts?
Thanks,
Steve
I hope Ican find a good friendster to be my friend
hope can find frends
i have my space account but i hate using it. friends of mine are using friendster and it offers lots of stuff than the other.that is only my opinion…. but all i can say is friendster is easy and friendly to use.
goin 2 gay
Naks
hope i can open my profile and i can sign up again for the friendster