The Friendster Tell-All Story

October 15th, 2006 at 2:17 am

I am developing a universal social network, if you’re interested in joining me on this new ubiquitious concept contact me by email asap. Located in Los Angeles here.

October 15th, 2006 at 3:38 am

The top management isn’t the only thing wrong with Friendster. Friendster will never make money for the company (or worse, the VC’s) as the ads displayed on the site are irrelevant to the content. I am creating a social network of my own, so I signed up for a bunch of social networks to note down what works and what doesn’t. After working my way around Bebo, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Friendster, Facebook, and many others mentioned on TechCrunch, I noticed that the worst network among them was Friendster.

Recently, there was a whole lot of controversy regarding Facebook’s open RSS format. Friendster has been doing this for a long time now. I get an email update everytime someone on my Friend’s list updates their profile, or uploads a new photo, or someone writes them a new testimonial. It is ridiculous.

The founders claim that Friendster is designed to interconnect closely related friends (as opposed to making friends with random people). But the minute you signup for a Friendster account, you begin receiving friendship requests from total strangers. For instance, some girl has been sending me a message almost daily eventhough I haven’t once replied to her:

Tina:
Message 1: how are you? me bored cause im grounded. my sis katie thinks youre cute but i think shes bluffing.

Message 2: are you going to join the millitary? i have a brother in the army, and whats the highest mathematics can you do?

Message 3: how are you ?and a question are you in college?

Message 4: whens your bday bc im a pisces to and i, just wondering

…and it goes on. I don’t like MySpace, but atleast MySpace is faster. Friendster is poorly designed. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to edit my profile. On top of that, the ads displayed have no relevance to anything on the page. Why do, and this includes other social networks, display ads on pages like “My Friends” or “Upload Your Profile Photo”?

As seth godin points out in his book, Permission Marketing, these ads are nothing but intrusive. After a while, they become background noise. Display ads where it makes sense.

But Anyway, sorry for the rant I will go code.

October 15th, 2006 at 4:41 am

In 2003 $30million was a lot of money. Even now…

October 15th, 2006 at 5:04 am

Very interesting piece!

Arrogance is the death-knell for many companies. It cannot exist at the board- or management-team levels.

The article also points out how it’s not enough just to assemble stars to start a company. When it happens, they have to be even more vigilant against the arrogance.

Two follow-ups to this:

(1) The lesson of Carly: http://breakoutperformance.blo.....oming.html

and

(2) Some recent research of what drives early VC-backed firm sales growth:
http://breakoutperformance.blo.....acked.html

Thanks,

Eric

October 15th, 2006 at 5:30 am

I remember shortly after Friendster launched, and Jonathan Abrams was responding to comments — I made a few suggestions about how it might be a good idea to integrate blogs and rss feeds.

My suggestion was laughed off by Abrams as being ‘too geeky’ for their audience — and his arrogance was clearly apparent.

I stopped using Friendster from then on.

October 15th, 2006 at 5:59 am

Couldn’t agree more. It’s a pity that many users in Singapore caught onto the Frienster hype, but as soon as the site started crawling for prolonged periods of time, people began pulling out. Today it’s nothing more than a white elephant which Singaporeans use to check out the photos of others. Far from a ’social network’.

One thing I haven’t figured out:- why Friendster got so much attention here in Singapore… leaps and bounds ahead of any other social network like hi5, Orkut, or even MySpace. I don’t recall them doing any aggressive marketing or publicity.

Food for thought?

October 15th, 2006 at 6:07 am

was called http://shitcrunch.wordpress.com/

October 15th, 2006 at 7:03 am

“To the two people developing social web sites who commented on this post.
Why are you guys jumping into this crowded market? I’m not saying this to be rude or anything, but I’ve always been curious that we still see new RSS reading companies and social websites popping up everyday when the market is pretty much completely saturated….” - James

James, I’ve stuck around blogs like TechCrunch and others long enough to realize that this question will inevitably be asked of me. It is perfectly legitimate.

With tons of social networking sites plaguing the net, you would think it is time to stop creating one more. naah uhh. On the contrary, I think the reason for the sudden emergence of these networks is directly due to the fact that there isn’t a set market leader (except in the teen market), and also because many niches haven’t yet been filled. The problem with the current trend, though, is that most of these networks are targetting the same age group, the boobless teen. The idea is that teens have endless amount of time to waste once on the network. What these networks overlook is the fact that these teens already have MySpace and other established communities to show off their colors. Plus, many teens are warry of using credit cards online, so they are less likely to monetize the site. As the current trend hits puberty, the networks will branch out from the teen age group into targetting more specialized markets. They have to, it is a matter of survival.

There are enough social networks targetting teens, so it is futile to add one more to the list. With my social network, I am gathering the intelligent crowd between 18 to 35. We are creating a social network for geeks, political, military, business oriented people. In my opinion it is a niche market that has yet to be dominated.

Also, I haven’t yet seen any social network implementing an ad revenue system that actually works. Goooooogle ads do not work on user profiles because there isn’t much content present. As the number of people in Shuzak (the name of our social network) increase, it will become easier for us to implement our own ad system which will target ads based on user habits rather than the content on their profiles. Social networks have access to a huge wealth of information on each user; it is not difficult to code an algorithm that extracts information regarding what user interests are. For example, if you, as a user, join several astronomy community, it makes sense to display ads related to “telescopes”.

We need to stop depending on Google ads and innovate. No one is doing it, so we will do it.

Sorry for the detailed reply. This is not some guerilla marketing attempt. Shuzak hasn’t yet been profiled by any blog because I kept it under the umbrella until the last few days. In fact, you guys are the first to find out through a blog. Take care,
Jawad
biohazard@gmail.com

October 15th, 2006 at 8:17 am

Not selling Google was not a particular bad thing. Friendster could have become what myspace is today. That was specially many management mistakes taken by the company that have nothing to do with turn down Google´s offert.

October 15th, 2006 at 9:01 am

With each new update, friendster becomes hard to use and less interesting …

October 15th, 2006 at 9:45 am

Could you please use reddit’s New York Times Link Generator for future links to the NY Times? Not everyone has an account: http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink

October 15th, 2006 at 9:55 am

Pity it’s gone that bad, but with a better management system they should be able to come back again.

October 15th, 2006 at 10:00 am

With all the talk about Friendster being a bust, I don’t know how in the world Classmates.com gets off the hook. That is one opportunity squandered if there ever was one, and if that’s not a classic social network, what is?

The WSJ article compares how Friendster was more rigid than the ‘open’ Myspace with regard to viewing profiles.

Have you ever tried to send or respond to an email, or view a picture on Classmates?? You can’t even communicate with anyone without upgrading to Gold membership. If you burp, it’ll cost you. It’s a frustrating visit to say the least.

Someone either take that pig out back and slaughter it, or otherwise, rip down the fences and set it free. There could be big gains, but first it needs brains.

October 15th, 2006 at 11:18 am

Jawad Shuaib said “People between the age of 18 and 35 are not stupid. Most startup founders are in that age group. Most scientific revolutions come from that age. And this is the age group that is more fired up to go lengths to prove their point of view. I don’t see many 40+ people standing outside protesting GMO’s at below zero temperatures.”

Mr Business Golf said “I don’t see the intelligence to this when there is a Huge untapped over 40 market that has much more experience and money than the “crowd” you are wanting to run it. Are you sure you are not trying to find a date instead of business people?”

I’m going to have to agree with Mr. Business Golf here. You never have addressed the question posed to you, nor have you addressed that there is a HUGE untapped over 40+ market.

I looked at your site, and Technically Speaking it’s not ready for beta yet from what I see. In fact so much, that you don’t even have a link to your “about” at the bottom of the page. You need to at least make sure your links work on your site before you invite people for beta testing. I mean - seriously - “About” — people that are interested in your site and concepts — even if they are 18-35 years old — would probably like to know a bit about who you are, what the site’s purpose is, and …

IF you are SERIOUS about getting investors — I’m sure they would like to know a bit more before dropping a load of cash on your business.

Yes, if you are truly serious about getting a new social networking site up and running - more power to you. It doesn’t matter if you are 18-35 or over 40+ — if you beta something that looks like crap or isn’t complete - it’s going to be ignored, and ignored no matter what the age group.

Take a listen to the podcast over on Coffee with Rex Dixon - http://clickcaster.com/coffee-with-rex-dixon. You might learn something, even though neither of us fall into the 18-35 range.

Rex

October 15th, 2006 at 11:46 am

Hey Rex, the reason why I am not targetting the 40+ market is chiefly because I don’t understand that age group. There is also the problem with getting active people that age to join Shuzak; where will I get them from? Statistics show that almost all Digg/Reddit users are in their 20s. Why not avail this market when there is enough room available?

As you noticed, the site is not ready. That is exactly why I haven’t asked Mike to review it on TechCrunch yet. It is in early beta (only 650 users at this second) and as I said earlier, this is the first time anyone is finding out outside of my circle of friends. You will be hearing a lot more about it two weeks from now

This is turning into advertisement, I should probably stop replying now.

ps) I am listening to the netcast, thnx for pointing it out.

October 15th, 2006 at 12:02 pm

Nice story.
Id love to know how much has been invested into the company in total.

October 15th, 2006 at 1:03 pm

Can anyone point to a technical discussion of friendster’s scaling problems? What were they running?

October 15th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

Friendster has 31 Million members . It uses php just like facebook .
How have they failed with an Alexa ranking of 41 . They are not as sucessfull a Myspace but they cant be counted out either .

October 15th, 2006 at 2:04 pm

I’m starting a new social networking entity called Life. The way you participate is you first turn off your computer, then get the fuck out of you house and do things like a normal person would.

October 15th, 2006 at 2:35 pm

Mike,
As you are an investor in Dogster and highlighting the mistakes that Friendster has been making as aforementioned in this article. What are you doing as an owner in the company to prevent similar mistakes from happening to Dogster so you can see a solid ROI? Just curious. I know that they are two different business models, but they just both happen to end with “ster” so it reminded of Dogster.

October 15th, 2006 at 3:04 pm

Friendster was originally built using Java… that’s the reason it was so slow. they finally switched to PHP to fix the problems, but by then it was too late.

October 15th, 2006 at 4:00 pm

“Friendster ended up with three levels of V.P.’s, C.E.O.’s and board members who, …”

Tell me how any startup can succeed once it gets to that.

The founders have to spend all their day pleasing the bosses rathe rather than users. Soon you will be replaced with a “professional CEO” who knows how to say the right things to pleases the bosses.

October 15th, 2006 at 4:31 pm

Take the cropped Bruce MacPherson illustration off your site. WTF!?!

You didn’t pay for it and the artist didn’t intend or approve of it being presented that way.

October 15th, 2006 at 4:58 pm

Jawed — ‘Shuzak’ is not a good name choice. If you want to achieve critical mass, you need ot use english words in a way that is memorable yet resonates with the users you’re catering to.

Might seem like a small, trivial thing that can be changed at any time, but you only have to look at the most successful online ventures today to learn by example.

October 15th, 2006 at 5:08 pm

For those who want to have fast loading times, I can’t say enough good things about memcached:

http://www.danga.com/memcached/

Basically, it works. So after your Php-mysql application become popular and you start load balancing, you can put in memcached and cache database results beautifully.

October 15th, 2006 at 5:30 pm

I agree with bill. i dont think alexa’s a good source either.

October 15th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

“As the number of people in Shuzak (the name of our social network) increase, it will become easier for us to implement our own ad system which will target ads based on user habits rather than the content on their profiles.”

Wow, what a thrilling website name….Shuzak. That’ll really ring off the ol’ tongue the next time I’m drinking. “Hey, you on Shuzak? No. What the fuck is Shuzak.”

Friendster, now that was a cool name.

October 15th, 2006 at 5:57 pm

And Jawad I just visited your site.

It sucks.

But that giving Karma idea…..totally brilliant. I completely applaud your creative abilities. I think if we were to meet in person I would get goosebumps because I would be in the presence of the next Einstein.

October 15th, 2006 at 8:26 pm

if we look at the Youtube acquisition, looks like Google is aligning its resources to devouring a lot more social networking sites. So if you are still planning to hit the jackpot, launch your sites ASAP

October 15th, 2006 at 9:16 pm

Juwad wrote:

We are creating a social network for geeks, political, military, business oriented people. In my opinion it is a niche market that has yet to be dominated.

WTF?? a network for geeks , political, military..etc etc….what about the healthcare professionals and the amature athletes and the religious zealots? why stop there, let’s add the homeless vets and 3-legged dogs.

I like how you’ve highjacked this comments board to spam about your site.

October 15th, 2006 at 10:28 pm

After being a loyal friendster and myspace user I decided to build my own social network. Its going to be amazing, social network for people that build social networks…I call it kaka.com

October 15th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

Apologies. In my previous comment, I referred to myyearbook as myfacebook. My mistake. Gosh, I guess I’m not as intelligent as I thought I was.

October 15th, 2006 at 11:32 pm

When some is giving you $30 please take it, don’t get greedy not every one can do what Yahoo! did.

October 15th, 2006 at 11:51 pm

the best part of the friendster article is the quote by mark pincus..pincus is the strangest quoted guy on the internet and in social networking and he did what…tribe…right, way to go mark….and you are critical of friendster!!!!

October 16th, 2006 at 7:27 am

Everytime someone creates a new social networking site, God kills a kitten.

October 16th, 2006 at 10:37 am

My observation of the current state of “social networking” - a gazillion sites that do pretty much the same thing (sure some say we target the teen demographic while others state that they target the 30’s demographic, etc.) - leads me to believe that there is a fundamental problem / error that needs to be addressed by the majority of respective founders.

Namely, it seems that most sites derive their etiological origin from (1) “how do we make a lot of money really fast as opposed to (2) “how do we solve a problem that is causing a lot of ‘pain’ for a number of people.”

(I once heard it said that if you try to compete with Google on a product that their employees / engineers use everyday themselves, you might as well give up, because they will beat you. However, if you compete with Google on a product that their employees do not use on a routine basis, and you use it frequently to solve a problem that plaques you, your chances of succes are exponentially higher.)

Point being … if a social networking site is being developed to “make money,” the “directors / power people” will not be sufficiently cognitive of the environmental dynamics that will drive users to their site - generate “traction.” If a social networking site is being developed that addresses a present “pain” that is felt by a number of individuals, it will generate “traction” with little effort - the “viral” effect.

In short, I hope all the developers of new social networking sites the best. Unfortunately, it seems that most will fail to get off the ground becuase most are being driven by a desire to make a quick buck as opposed to solve a “pain” - and just to be clear, their is ample “pain” yet to be attenuated that could drive the growth of any number of sites. (I’ll bet most “founders” will respond by stating a “pain” that they are trying to address, but deep down, they realize that their “desire for a quick buck” is the true “master.)

My 2c.

October 16th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

Susan a, I’ll be purposely vague, but hope this helps.

MySpace (”first generation sites”) was driven by the “pain” of wanting to hook up with hot chicks, whereas FaceBook (”second generation sites”) was driven by the “pain” of not wanting your boss / mom seeing all of your wild photos of you partying / drunk. (I’m being very general as I’m quite cognizant that their are a host of other “pains” that both “first generation” and “second generation” sites address.)

Nonetheless, here are a couple of “pains” yet to be addressed. (1) Unfortunately, we do not live our “social lives” in one dimention. In other words, for the most part, when a “friend” visits your page, they are able to see all of your other friends. (2) Humans are only able to keep close tabs on groups as long as they stay under 150 people … nonetheless, we can manage a number of groups. (You’ve gotta be kidding me if you think individuals can keep current with all 3000 of their friends on MySpace / Facebook.)

October 16th, 2006 at 7:11 pm

Great article. I wonder how the industry would change if the true stories of what went on behind the scenes at many of this companies often got more mainstream coverage. Even more interesting to me was comparing this article to the previous NYT article on Friendster - http://www.emaildashboard.com/....._cove.html

October 17th, 2006 at 11:17 am

I gotta say, if I was in his position back then I might not have sold my site either. Hindsight is 20/20 and his hindsight saw Google and eBay holding out and being worth much more than their initial valuations.

It’s a shame really, that by seeking out the investment he had to give up so much control to an obviously clueless board of directors. I say clueless in that they had no idea what to make of Friendster, even though they were immensely successful with previous projects. I guess it goes to show that you can’t rest on your laurels… you have to remain current and innovative.

Coming from the perspective of one who is working on his first startup with a budgest equivalent to the money these board members spend on breakfast crumpets, I found this story oddly motivational. It proves that you can have the best minds and all the money in the world at your fingertips but if you lose your true vision and place your customers as an afterthought, it’s won’t get you anywhere. Sure, I won’t have the marketing budget to gain instant global exposure, but that forces me to tax my brain on other options. And other options there are.

Great post!

December 9th, 2006 at 3:06 am

When I heard that a lot of my friends were using Friendster, I thought about signing up too. But they’d always complain about the sudden changes and upgrades of the profile page. Plus the slowness. So I was like, hey, that sucks. But I still signed up inspite of myself. Luckily when I started using it I didn’t experience such things. I even got to personalize my profile without encountering any problems, until now. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time upgrading my profile so I could promote it to my friends and then what happened next? Friendster came up with a new profile format. And I don’t even know how to edit the new profile page! Man, that sucks!

January 20th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

Since wen i came here in the US…
Itz been a long time since i havent seen mah frwends back in the philippines
Bout 4 years now…(sigh)
But then i heard about Frienster….
So i joined….nd OMG….
I didnt kno there were lotz of Filipinos there..like meh…
I waz surprised i saw lotz of my frwendz der….
Friendster iz the BOMB!!!

March 4th, 2007 at 11:40 pm

ang ganda q talaga hehehe ^_^ sana may bf aq pag naglaro me mamaya pa add naman po?soul_switheart@yahoo.com p add po mga kuya hehehe^^i luv u to all friendster muwhahahaha

dedicated to all loving care^-^ hahaahhahaahha
wish a upon the star are blind