I knew the glory days of Friendster were behind them, but I didn’t know things were this bad. The company is proudly announcing a partnership with Washington based people search company Intelius this evening. The goal, they say, is “to provide a more robust and comprehensive user search experience on Friendster and to power people searches originating on Friendster with results from across the web.”
What Friendster isn’t saying is how they’ll monetize this search, and whether Intelius’ scammy privacy services will be offered to Friendster users. Earlier this year we wrote again about Intelius and the myriad of lawsuits and consumer complaints that the company was fighting.
To summarize those posts, Intelius has been accused of tricking users into long term credit card subscriptions via a third party for worthless privacy protection products.
The Friendster press release doesn’t talk about how the service will be monetized, but it looks like the integration may be through a recent Intelius acquisition, Spock.
I’ve emailed Friendster for clarification on whether or not they plan on exposing their users to Intelius’ very questionable monetization practices. Because if they are this desperate for revenue, it’s a sign that Friendster is in very serious trouble indeed.
Where were you Mike? I almost missed you!
I’m on a sort of half vacation, posting light this week. But this Intelius stuff is bad news.
Oh my god, it is really bad news. How the user able to request deleting all their post and comments in Friendster? Are we as a user stuck with our old posting in Friendster?
Oh my god, it is absolutely privacy nightmare.
Oh my god, all my privates data/info/comments/posting will go to scammy company that will sell my info.
Oh my god, any body able to help us now?
Oh my god, again it is bad news.
did god ever answer to all your Oh my god’s?
This post should really be titled “Friendster – Still Not Dead”
Oh it’s dead alright… I just think no one told them.
cool
Here’s an idea for Friendster: partner with Intelius and Phorm! (http://en.wikip....org/wiki/Phorm)
At least they can be sure to have a lot of publicity then — not the best though
Friendster’s founders should have sold the company for $300 million to Google in 2003 and patented their idea. Now the site is stuck while MySpace a copycat did well after the News Corp bought it at a big discount of just 550 mil when it should have been 5 bil.
It was $30M not $300 and yes, they should have sold back then. The company has been plagued with management issues from day 2.
I think Friendster is really desperate by now.
Really bad, but is/was Friendster profitable ?
$45.5M was not enought for a first generation SN to become a leader ?
…a tip: I’m leaving a comment from a new (but quite ugly) web application that lets to preview pages in a Ajax fashion style, but in very very confortable way (take a look here: http://www.progredi.com)
Bye.
I think Friendster is desperate for some time now. I think they didn’t innovate and change fast enough when they were on the top. I have never heard of nice user customization (like wallpapers, fonts, etc) that myspace have. I never heard of Friendster widgets, boxes, phone interface, linking, pictures and what not.
MySpace has “nice user customization?” Ha ha, good one.
Friendster has been dead since I deleted my account over five years ago, but it has been especially dead since they started allowing no-click registration, activation, and login.
I can’t count the number of times some Malaysian teenager has used one of my domains for their account, where I receive a “Thanks for signing up!” email, then log on to delete the account and they already have 150 friends and a crapload of comments and photos. Maybe they aren’t really a Malaysian teenager, but still.
This is really, really bad news.
Amazon UK were involved a virtually identical scam to that via their checkout (shopper discounts and rewards scheme) – I kept getting charged by my bank for going over my limit every month and it took me 6-9 months (ish) to realize that during purchase of a CD from Amazon I had been signed up so a club that took £8.00 a month
- it was this £8 that was getting me the £25.00 a month bank charge – I don’t buy from Amazon UK anymore because of this – they gave my credit card details to this 3rd party without my permission – trust – gone.
link to one of many typical complaints -
http://www.comp...th-c241691.html
Note it took me so long to ’see’ the error on my card statements as I couldn’t believe a big brand would use such a cheap trick, so ignored it as some error I must be making in my calculations.
finally, someone to compete in scummy practices in “people search” against Reunion.com
I HATE Intelius as I’m one of the victims of their deceptive practices. I purchased a report from them for $4.99 and about a month later, I noticed a $29 subscription charge in my bank report. I tried calling Intelius but was kept on hold for hours. In the end, I had to cancel my bank card and get a new one so that Intelius would stop charging me.
The guy who started this compnay is someone who makes all Indians look bad. He scammed thousands of people with InfoSpace and now he’s doing it again. I was very surprised when he got away with Infospace scam with only a slap on the wrist and now I’m appalled that he’s getting away with all this crap once again!
I believe you’re referring to a Mr. Naveen Jain, better known around Seattle for his Dot Con Job: http://seattlet...ness/infospace/
Yea I thought friendster had been defunct for a long time now which is ironic because I don’t ever remember a time when they actually went out of beta if at all. Ahh the teenage memories of our first social networking experiences, lets not forget its close cousin enemyster which may have been the primary reason for the east cost vs west coast gangster rap rivalry. ; )
It will be interesting to see what nets out from the Friends new partership with Intelius. As far as people search data, Intelius is the best. Always worked well for me, so I’m interested to see how they become integrated.
Michael, you sure do bash the shit out of them. Do Intelius searches turn up bad info on you from your youth and you can’t get the info removed?
Time to rename the service Spamster. What’s next? A joint venture with Adult Friend Finder?
After reading Joseph’s Link above, it’s embarassing that one of the biggest con-jobs could be pulled off by an Indian.
Setting a bad name for Indians, who would rather goto sleep hungry than take one dollar through bad intentions.
I just spent an hour reading through this link: I suggest you do the same. It’s an excellent read regarding what exactly took place during that time.
http://seattlet...ness/infospace/
I just joined Friendster. going to ditch Twitter & Facebook.. Friendster is COMING BACK!
http://profiles...com/adamjackson
Many companies do this stuff. I think the worst of the lot is whitepages.com/USSearch.
But Amazon, Hertz, and many others do too.
http://ventureb...-than-intelius/
I don’t know much about the space but since Friendster seems to be primarily international users now isn’t it impossible to have the service you’re describing?