What Happened to Friendster?

Does anyone remember Friendster? Yes! It’s one of the first movers on social networking site for consumers.  Back then, Friendster WAS an online community that connects people through networks of friends and nowadays, Friendster has become a social gaming portal. Malaysian company, MOL agreed to acquire Friendster for roughly $100 million and on 31^st of May 2011, Friendsters had deleted its users' content. To be honest, I have no idea whether the takeover was necessary for Friendster. But I suppose that was the only way to save Friendster from bankruptcy. But then, isn’t it just sad to see one of the pioneers of social media site turned into social gaming portal? (No offense for gamer). And even, the young billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Friendster was a model for his new website (Facebook)

Friendster's Page During the Old Days

So, basically what exactly happened with Friendster? Why did Friendster lose its supremacy?  Fierce competition was clearly one of the factors behind the collapse of Friendster. When Friendster was enjoying its first mover advantage, several competitors such as MySpace and Facebook came up and started to threaten Friendster’s market share and eventually due to lack of innovation in technology, Friendster had given up its “supremacy” to its competitors. Lack of innovation. Yes. I suppose this was also another reason of Friendster’s collapse. And this was also admitted by Jim Scheinman, the former Friendster executive who says that “For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side and I remember reading thousands of customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had just launched called MySpace”. 

In addition, according to Peter Pachal, Friendster also didn’t understand some basic principle of social media. Friendster put way too much emphasize on the media side not the social side. Friendster was lacking in terms of “news feed”. It seemed that the only thing to do on Friendster at that time was polishing our profile and getting the testimonial from friends as much as we could. In contrast, although in the early days Facebook was about profile too, but then Zuckerberg has realized that Facebook's news feed was the key to its long-term success. What they did was putting friends' updates, shares, and discussions to the front and centre of the page. Full article can be read here. Therefore, due to genius movement made by Zuckerburg, Friendster did not have a chance to stand up against Facebook. Even if Friendster had introduced its comparable experience to the news feed, it was far too late for them.

Friendster's Page in Current Days

Based on the Friendster’s case, do you think what happened to Friendster might also happen to Facebook? 

Cheers,
Ivan