Here’s a New York Times article about Jonathan Abrams’ decision to not sell Friendster to Google. Instead, he decided to take venture capital and try to turn his startup into a billion dollar company. The article suggests that this was a big mistake in hindsight (hard to disagree with that) for Abrams and also suggests that Friendster would probably have held onto the number one spot in the social networking rankings.
And with Google’s ample resources, Friendster might have solidified its position as the pioneering front-runner in social networking. Instead, Mr. Abrams has the distinction of founding a company that is shorthand for potential unmet.
I completely disagree with this. MySpace has a few key differences that helped it become number one, but most are irrelevant when compared with how it used music to really grow its userbase. Music (indie, local, etc.) gave MySpace the traction to get people to join and the momentum to overtake Friendster and rapidly grow itself into the dominating position it is in today. I think I’ve posted about this before, but I’m too lazy to link (its saturday!).
Anyways, one last comment on the article– the HBS professor comments about Friendster’s fall:
Friendster’s fate is “a real puzzle,” Professor Piskorski said. “This was a company that had the talent and had the connections.” he said. “They had this great idea that people really took to.”
There is no single reason that explains Friendster’s failures, Professor Piskorski added, which is what makes it academic fodder. “It’s a power story,” he said. “It’s a status story. It’s an ego story.” But largely, he said, Friendster is a “very Silicon Valley story that tells us a lot about how the Valley operates.”
That’s not completely accurate. Friendster had huge technical issues from the beginning. The website could not scale with its userbase growth. The site would constantly go down, load slowly, and it eventually took a toll on its userbase. After all, being on Friendster was about surfing around, looking at pics, reading testimonials, and wasting time. As soon as this became torturous, people started leaving.
That’s when the tailspin started– the userbase started to become stale; Friendster pages started to become stale. Stale content meant that there was no reason to keep going back to Friendster. When the novelty effect wore off, there was no new content to keep users coming back. All this snowballed on the company and it wasn’t long before it started to decline. Meanwhile, MySpace was starting to rock it, and that’s when a lot of people started to jump ship. Somewhere in there, Friendster completely changed their technology, which improved the site’s performance, but it wasn’t enough to save itself. I feel like this was not that long ago so if you were hip to social networking, you would know what I’m talking about.
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