Gary Rivlin at the New York Times finally wrote the Friendster “tell all” piece that everyone’s been threatening to do for some time (me included). It’s not pretty. I get the sense the most people mentioned in the article are not going to be very happy with the way it turned out. Many of them have actively been trying to stop an article like this from being written.
Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003.
Everything went downhill from there.
Instead of selling to Google, founder Jonathan Abrams raised venture capital. Friendster eventually raised money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, BenchMark Capital and Battery Ventures. Some of the most successful and well known venture capitalists in silicon valley joined Friendster’s board of directors.
Friendster stumbled just as MySpace rose. Many people point to Friendster’s massive slow down as traffic grew as the reason people bailed out for the then hot new MySpace. If Friendster had been able to handle its growth, MySpace may never have gotten the space it needed to become the 1 billion plus page views per day behemoth it is today.
Key points of failure seem to be a disastrous initial architecture that just couldn’t scale, a succession of high profile but out of touch CEOs (Tim Koogle, then Scott Sassa, then Taek Kwan), infighting at the executive level (particularly between the VP Product and VP Engineering) and a general level of arrogance at the board and executive level. No one is spared in the article, including Kleiner Perkins Partner John Doerr and former partner Russ Siegelman
After a failure to sell the company in late 2005, they recapitalized early this year and Kent Lindstrom, one of the founders of Friendster, took over as President. He’s not one to talk about his own accomplishments, but Friendster seems to be trending upwards now at least. He brings the company what it needs - a steady and low key leader who focuses on the product.
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.
I think the top management had a lot do to with Friendster downhill. Not selling to Google in 2003 seems a bad decision if we analyse it today with all the facts at the table, but by the time it was not so easy to understand what was going on.
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.
Just wanted to mention a feature that I personally do not like with Friendster as a former user of it. When you view other people’s profiles, the user whose profile you are looking can tell that you viewed it, unless you turn on the “View Profiles Anonymously” feature.
I don’t remember Friendster warning us about implementing such a feature since I’ve been using it in 2003. This could be advantageous in some ways also because you can see what types of people that you are attracting to your profile and if you don’t want randoms to visit your profile to begin with, you can tamper with the privacy settings.
However, you can sort of tell how much people unapprove of the “See Who’s Viewed My Profile” if other social networks like Facebook and MySpace have not implemented a similar feature, such as how Friendster copied some of the features from those social networks.
In 2003 $30million was a lot of money. Even now…
Mike
Why do you think it’s OK to copy paste graphics from other web sites?
Do you want others to do that to your blog?
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
how was the name of the blog about new web 2.0 dead companies?
http://www.tech... something
i cant found it…
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.
To the two people developing social web sites who commented on this post.
Why are you guys juping 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. I’d love to hear your reasoning on it (it actually really does interest me)
Sorry for taking this thread in another direction and possibly (but I hope it doesn’t come off as) trolling
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?
I’ve been thinking about this idea of social networking but it really somehow comes to a screeching halt somewhere. People need to do some really collaborative stuff to get something out of that social network. A good example is gamedesire.com (well its a gaming area and lots of games like pool, snooker,etc). They are still rather clunky and not really social network oriented but I see people do get around and stay in that area. And sure mostly its all young teenagers who are mostly grounded.
Anyways this
[quote]
But at the same time, some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were lobbying Mr. Abrams, a computer programmer, to reject Google’s offer. America Online had offered the two founders of Yahoo a few million dollars each in the mid-90’s for their Web site — and both became billionaires because they said no.
[/quote]
is a load of crap as its not 90s. You’ll see more of the segmentation of the social network arena. Not everyone wants to go everywhere.
was called http://shitcrunch.wordpress.com/
I think Friendster recoded the infrastructure from some language into PHP.
I love PHP but recoding an entire community can take time and cause a speed bump
“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
Is friendster really such a failure? It’s ranked #41 on alexa. Surely that’s got to be worth a lot of money, more than the $30 million they turned down I would have thought.
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.
Jawad said…”I am gathering the intelligent crowd between 18 to 35”
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?
The Shuzak site does not offer anything close to being worthy of being called anything more than a Chat Room…where is the Networking that is needed to keep member’s interests?
I think Mr Arrington’s point here is clear. Here is another Online Social Networking Group heading for the Delete Button on it’s member’s keyboard because its leaders, who probably fall into the 18 to 35 Crowd, were not intelligent enough to use practical business methods until it was too late, which someone over 35 would have had the experience to know to use proven solid business practices from the beginning.
One of the solid business practices being discussed here has to do why did they start Friendster anyway. And the answer now is not to add another online social networking group into the mix when most intelligent people are grouping to flush twice before joining another social group that is set up for the 18 to 35 age group that provide no value to the upcoming 2.0 concpet.
Bring on the sites that let business people network in a controlled social environment and you will see the 2.0 concept flourish. What the capital venture people are looking for right now…is the answer to this question.
Who will be first to build a site that has No Ads anywhere to insult the member’s of the site’s intelligence and offer a clean professional controlled (meaning no MLM or Spamming) environment? Whoever can answer that question will be the person who capitalizes on this over 100 million business people market that is entering the internet with “0 Balance Credit Cards” and looking for a safe harbor online social group to join to keep away from the MySpace and Friendster and now Shuzak groups in cyber space.
With each new update, friendster becomes hard to use and less interesting …
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. Shuzak is not “another” chat room, in fact, one of the problems I am having at the moment is teaching some new concepts to the people, such as giving “Karma” to topics (but not in the way Digg does; which prompts trolling).
But let us not discuss Shuzak here. As Mike pointed out “With each new update, friendster becomes hard to use and less interesting”. This is exactly what Friendster, MySpace and others are doing. “More is less” mantra is simply not being practiced. Bebo has all these *features* (polls, white boards, comments, blogs, quiz, etc) that are supposed to make the site interactive; and they do make the site interactive…for about a week
After that, nobody uses them. I don’t see many social networks staying true to their core principles. A feature, such as a blog, which many social networks seem to be adding, is pretty much useless less than 1% of the active members are actually utilizing it!
“Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler” - Einstein
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
I agree that it might not be ideal to create a social network site at this point - unless you can jam and make it grow extremely fast, like at least 1 mil unique visitors minimum in less than a year, I’d probably opt to tap into one of the next user trends coming up instead. Especially with the changes that many anticipate with user behavior, the growth of passive entertainment, etc.
Pity it’s gone that bad, but with a better management system they should be able to come back again.
How I remember Friendster so well — back in 2003 I wanted to join one of these social-network/blog type sites, and could NOT get in for some bizarre reason. I then signed on to a site called “Blogdrive”, but quickly found out that people there were flocking to a site called “MySpace”, and that was that. History in the making.
The word “arrogance” is used several times in the NY Times article to describe the founders of Friendster, and it pretty much sums things up. This extreme conceit of those who put down MySpace back then can now be found in the “brilliant” brains of those who poo-poo YouTube.
Here is some sober math: YouTube was sold for $1.6 billion in Google stocks, and consider the hypothetical worst scenario in which Google’s stock value gets cut 90% some day, the YouTube founders, backers, and employees still get to take home $160 million.
The moral of the story for you developers: make it easy for everybody to join and stick around.
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.
I believe the upper management of friendster was the main reason for its downfull..
I don’t see how it can recoup its losses
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
I think Friendster’s like that proverbial “Cheerleader That Never Got Laid”. Blogged about it here if you like to check it out.
http://bjornlee.wordpress.com/.....the-story/
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.
Hey Jawad - I’m all for innovation, new things, etc… I was only pointing some things out to you, and I’m glad you knew that. You can hit me up in e-mail if you would like to further discuss this. I agree, this is almost turning into an ad for your site, which is not cool in some circles as this is comments on the Friendster article that Mike posted. Hit me up in e-mail if you would like to discuss further.
Rex
Nice story.
Id love to know how much has been invested into the company in total.
In some sense, Friendster is kind of too conservative in maintaining users’ privacy sorta thing. I think there are limitations on whose profile you can read
and the same with hi5. Also there is too little personal page customization allowed.
I think, MySpace’s key success strategy is allowing people to add as many effects to their pages as they like, even some may make their pages slow to load, badly organized, and/or hard to read, if that’s what the users want, they can do it.
http://kunalu.com/blog/index.p.....amp;PID=87
Can anyone point to a technical discussion of friendster’s scaling problems? What were they running?
http://www.siliconbeat.com/ent....._more.html
So Friendster founder left the company to that socialzr . In the NY Times article hs seem to think VC money ruined him .
I guess entering the SN space depends on how much money you want to make . If you are a one man business and you can pay your bills then there is no harm in trying. I think people generally think that when you say SN you are trying to compete with MYSPACE . This is not always true .
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 .
People are forgetting the arrogance of Jonathan Abrams, the founder, and his attitude towards the community. Ultimately, he alienated the core group of freindster users and while his poor architecture ground the site to a crawl he basked in the glow of being the man-of-the-minute.
Who knows what that $30 million would mean today if it was in pre-IPO Google stock. His arrogrance cost him a literal fortune.
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.
I used to use friendster when it was slow. I thought it was just me. I can’t believe how slow the team at friendster was to fix it? What was the cause? I know they had a PHP front end. PHP might have been too slow to handle such a big load. I also think their tool to link users to other users was probably inefficient.
Anywho, things are much faster at Friendster.
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.
“We completely failed to execute,” Mr. Doerr said. “Everything boiled down to our inability to improve performance.”
Yep, it was the performance issue. Never mind that they went through 4 CEOs in 12 months and never really had an idea implemented on the site beyond “let’s get old friends in touch.”
MySpace performance was pretty bad at times too and they aren’t considered a failure.
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.
I hope that Friendster will succeed in the long run. It’s easy to be an armchair executive and say I would have done this or that. Remember: Friendster pioneered many new concepts. Without the proper resources or access to a talent pool “pre funding”, things WILL turn out as they did. The lesson I took away from Friendster was that if you site seems slow, then it is and its not going to fix itself. Upgrade your servers or technology ASAP. Make it Fast, Make the search work “Give people what they want”, Keep it simple. I call that the craigslist formula.
“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.
The problem is, what does Friendster offer that MySpace and Facebook don’t? Why does everyone use MySpace? Because everyone else does. MySpace got out way ahead and now everyone has to play catchup.
Until someone takes a different angle on social networking (like wallop for example, but i’m still not sold on it), MySpace will keep being the one to beat. It’s niche time kids, lets get smart and think long term.
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.
Let’s pick again. Whose side are u on, friendster or myspace? I will go for friendster. First, they are the pioneer of social networking bubble. Second, they have a more interesting interface compare to myspace. Myspace has a bad color combination and too much images to click around.
I am still using friendster, instead of myspace. Friendster can beat myspace in round “8″.
Generally, both of the web2.0 company can be improved.
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.
” Is friendster really such a failure? It’s ranked #41 on alexa. Surely that’s got to be worth a lot of money… ”
are you serious ? Alexa counts for nothing and is a totally worthless barometer.
Zero credibility. Don’t base your value on what Alexa says. Its a bit like Technorati …they both make a lot of noise but here in the real world they don’t really matter.
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.
Personally, I didn’t use it because it was dog ass slow. That is the #1 reason it did not catch on with my friends too.