fwenster

i was reading INC, a mag about small businesses, when i came across an article about Friendster: how the concept was born, how it gave birth to a dot.com company, and how it eventually dug its own grave in the course of things. you can find the article here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea.html. a long read, but a pretty interesting one. ever wondered how Friendster came about? this is the article to read.

let me just mention that among other things that went wrong with the Friendster management and development team, the Filipinos were partly to blame in its downfall. hehehe! at least that's how i see it.

in a nutshell... Friendster is a technology-based dot-com company. the (then) new concept of online network community was enticing to investors. so Friendster landed huge investments, and with that comes a management team who knows how to push the right buttons in closing deals with big names that will secure its funding.

but amidst all the money and business strategy at Friendster, the technical aspect was left behind. as it experienced a boom in the number of users, the technology used in handling it wasn't powerful enough to cope up. what happened was the slowing down of the page loads. remember those times when you have to wait for minutes before your profile in Friendster loads up? this is it.

what most people may not know, the thousands of Filipinos signed up at Friendster contributed greatly in slowing down the page loads. here's an excerpt (page 5 on the article):

Meanwhile, scant attention was paid to Friendster's users. Lunt remembers marveling sometime in early 2004 at how Friendster's traffic would mysteriously spike at 2 a.m. Intrigued, he started looking at the site's log. Oh, my God, he thought, everyone is from the Philippines. He worked backwards, looking for "patient zero"--the first American to "Friendster" a Filipino. He found Carmen Leilani De Jesus, a 32-year-old marketing consultant and part-time hypnotherapist from San Francisco, the 91st person to join Friendster. She was directly connected to Abrams as well as to dozens of Filipinos, who'd in turn connected to thousands more. In fact, more than half the site's traffic was coming from Southeast Asia.

From a business standpoint, the revelation was devastating. Friendster, it turned out, was paying millions of dollars a year to attract eyeballs that were effectively worthless to its advertisers. Says Abrams: "We needed to make a tough decision"--either spin off the Asian business or become the No. 1 Filipino social network. But because the Filipino users had come by way of their American friends, there was no easy answer. If Friendster cut the cord to Asia--either by drastically cutting back on engineering resources or by kicking the Asian users off the site altogether--it risked damaging its American user base. The Carmens of the world might look for a less restrictive site.

Friendster decided to let the Asians stay, but in allowing that, the technical problem was still not taken care of, and probably have gotten worse. then comes MySpace, which, as we all know, is more popular in the US than Friendster. MySpace then turned the tide for Friendster, as it snatched away its American users, and potentially, advertisers.

and from then on, Friendster kept losing its appeal to advertisers and investors. changing CEOs frequently and the unproductive stance of the development team somehow sealed its casket. the Friendster we are seeing now will probably be the same Friendster in the years to come. there has been no talks of adding more features to it as it already has. it reached its plateau already.

oh well, i cannot fully say "another one bites the dust", since Friendster is pretty much alive, at least in the Philippines. a good businessman could tap that as a resource for something else other than what it was originally intended to be. we Filipinos are not technologically-challenged, you know. and for all we know, those Filipino users are not really in the Philippines and can actually avail of those stuff their ads talk about. =)