Read more: “Tech before its time: Six gadgets too good, too soon“
Type into your browser today, and you’ll be taken to a social networking site for gamers. Should you by any chance have forgotten who won the social networking battle, the blue button in the top right corner of Friendster’s home page reminds you by inviting visitors to log in with Facebook.
Friendster wasn’t the first social network – that honour goes to Six Degrees and a few niche communities built, for example, to track down your classmates – but it was the first attempt to rule the world. It came close. Just four months after its public launch in May 2003, the site boasted a few million members, and by 2005, it had roughly 17 million. But Friendster spent much of its eight-year existence limping down the mountain it had climbed so quickly. By 2006, The New York Times had already . Friendster in its original guise finally admitted defeat last year when it relaunched as a gaming site.
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What went wrong? Ironically, Friendster’s problem was its popularity. One of the site’s key features was showing users how they were connected to strangers via mutual friends, but calculating those connections took considerable processing power. The more people joined, the more the site strained under the computational load of their visits. By late 2003, it was not uncommon for your Friendster page to take more than half a minute to load.
Even as Friendster’s engineers struggled to keep the site running smoothly, its founder, Jonathan Abrams, was preoccupied with a different problem – fake profiles. Early versions of Friendster allowed only individual profiles. If you wanted to form a community, to connect with other students in your dormitory or people with an undying devotion to U2, you were out of luck, says Alice Marwick, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As early adopters will, users took matters into their own hands, creating personas known as “fakesters” representing buildings, groups or other entities. By friending “Perkins Hall” or “U2”, you could connect with other people who linked to these profiles. Before long, Friendster profiles included God, Drunk Squirrel, Giant Squid and Homer Simpson.
“Before long, Friendster profiles included God, Drunk Squirrel, Giant Squid and Homer Simpson”
Instead of seeing the need and trying to satisfy it, Abrams tried to quash the problem. He found the fakester phenomenon “infuriating”, Marwick says. Friendster hunted down and deleted fakester profiles without notifying their creators – a campaign that was dubbed “fakester genocide” and prompted an angry backlash. In so doing, it committed the cardinal sin of alienating its core users, says Danah Boyd, also at Microsoft Research New England. Once the exodus began, it was hard to stem the tide. “If all your friends are jumping to MySpace, you’re probably going to follow them even if you personally haven’t had a problem with Friendster,” Marwick says.
Social faux pas
These kinds of lessons proved crucial for the next generation of social networking sites. For example, MySpace welcomed the creation of group pages – whether these promoted dogs or musicians – a category Facebook later refined as fan pages. Mark Zuckerberg also famously restrained Facebook’s early growth to avoid the problem of overload.
The rest is history. First MySpace conquered Friendster. Then Facebook, with more than 800 million users today, climbed to the top of the food chain. Facebook may eventually fail too, Boyd says, but not for the reasons Friendster did. And the site won’t be so easy to topple. “Facebook is no longer simply a social network,” Boyd says. “It has become baked into the very essence of everyday life.”
In October 2003, Abrams declined a $30 million buyout offer from Google. Talk about a social blunder.