The Story of Friendster
Created in 2002, Friendster burst onto the burgeoning social media networking scene with a bold premise: to help users connect and reconnect with friends and help them find a date. Friendster was originally created as a dating website designed to safely connect like-minded individuals in a romantic setting (Ngak, 2011). However, Friendster’s use as a platform to reconnect with lost friendships and form new relationships based on mutual connections soon turned the site into a dual-purpose platform (Ngak, 2011). As a dating-site-turned-friendship-platform, Friendster boasted 3 million users within the first few months of existence, which was an uncanny feat in the 2002 era (Blitch, 2022). While The Sydney Morning Herald (2002) estimated 655 worldwide internet users by the end of 2002, a single internet platform exploding with millions of users within its first year was almost unheard of.
So what happened? Why is Friendster a social media network that I had never heard of before this week?
Friendster’s original purpose revolved around its users socializing with old friends and meeting new ones (Harvard, 2022). This concept really set the stage for the premise of the Facebook platform that we all know and love today, which was exactly Friendster’s problem. While the Friendster platform revolutionized online interactions and allowed its users to create and reconnect with others based on mutual connections, the concept of Friendster was easily copied and improved upon. When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook (originally thefacebook) in 2004, he took a lot of Friendster’s original ideas and capitalized on them. Very quickly, Zuckerberg’s Facebook began improving on the shortcomings of Friendster and slowly started making the Friendster platform obsolete. Offering more features and fewer bugs than its predecessor and inspiration, Facebook, and to an extent MySpace, began purging many Friendster users (Ngak, 2011). While Friendster’s executives were focused on acquiring other social networking sites and expanding their reach, Facebook and MySpace were looking at how to best improve their users’ experiences and resolve glitches on their sites in a timely manner (Harvard, 2022). The difference in focus for these platform executives was paramount to the success, or failure, of each platform.
Friendster’s founders and executives saw the threat that Facebook posed to their platform but were ultimately unable to compete with what that platform could offer its users (Harvard, 2022). Friendster rebranded itself from a social networking platform to a gaming website in 2011 and removed all user pages and accounts from the site (Fine, 2023).
While Friendster may be obsolete as a social networking site, we can still see the impact that this platform had on social media history. Friendster’s focus on reconnecting with old friends and making new ones based on common interests and mutual connections has been the foundation of dozens of more modern social networking sites, including MySpace and Facebook (Ngak, 2011). Friendster is credited with “giving birth to the modern social media movement,” according to Chenda Ngak (2011), and the argument can be made that social media would not be what it is today without Friendster’s impact. While the platform ultimately failed, Friendster walked so that sites like MySpace and Facebook could run.
In the story of Friendster, we can also see warnings for platforms of today to focus on providing the experiences that their users want without hyper focusing on exponential growth. If your platforms users aren’t happy, your platform will fail. We can see a modern-day example of this concern in the struggles of Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform in 2022. I think the modern-day concerns of Twitter are what prompted me to look more into Friendster and its demise. Plus, who can resist rooting for the underdog? It is easy to see the concerns and downfall of Friendster in hindsight, but at the time I’m certain that Friendster executives truly believed that their decisions were in the platform’s best interests. For me, the downfall of Friendster highlights the importance of studying the history of who and what came before us in an effort to learn from past mistakes and successes to benefit our own decisions. Perhaps Elon Musk could learn a few things from the executives of Friendsters past…
References:
Blitch, K. (2022, November 17). The History of Social Media — Lecture 1. UF Mediasite (Online Lecture). https://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/0f728829d6a5441986c01e52245645301d
Fine, C. (2023, August 14). From Vine to Friendster, a look back on defunct social networking sites we wish still existed. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/08/14/list-of-memorable-failed-social-media-sites/70509601007/
Harvard Ulumna. (2021, March 21). Before Facebook there was…Friendster? Yes, that’s right! Harvard Business School. https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/before-facebook-there-was-friendster-yes-thats-right/
Ngak, C. (2011, July 6). Then and now: a history of social networking sites. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/then-and-now-a-history-of-social-networking-sites/
The Sydney Morning Herald. (2002, November 19). Internet users to reach 655 million by year-end. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/internet-users-to-reach-655-million-by-year-end-20021119-gdfu3y.html
