Friendster

~ obituary ~

Friendster launched in March 2002, built by Jonathan Abrams in San Francisco. It was the first social network in the modern sense: real names, real photos, real friend connections, profile pages, testimonials, friends-of-friends discovery. By the end of 2003 it had 3 million users. In 2003 Google offered to buy it for $30 million in stock. Abrams declined. looking back this was, depending on Google's stock at exit, somewhere between a $1 billion and $50 billion mistake.

Friendster relaunched several times, pivoted to a Southeast Asian gaming portal in 2011, and finally shut down its social features completely on June 14, 2015; the brand technically still exists as a defunct domain. The original product, the original social network, the thing that taught Mark Zuckerberg what to build, has been gone since about 2007.

~ stats ~

~ what friendster invented ~

A surprising amount of what we now think of as the social network model was Friendster's. The "real name + real photo" expectation. The "friends" relationship as the primary unit. The "people you may know" suggestion. Profile pages with personal info, photos, and testimonials. The "what are you doing right now?" status update (predating Twitter by four years). Friend-of-friend discovery as the primary growth mechanism.

Almost everything you currently associate with Facebook's design was working on Friendster in 2003. Mark Zuckerberg was a Friendster user, and many of the early Facebook design choices were, frankly, copies of features that already worked on Friendster. The history has been quietly rewritten.

~ how it lost the US ~

Friendster's US collapse, 2004-2005, is one of the great cautionary tales of consumer software engineering, but the site became, by mid-2003, extremely popular. The infrastructure could not scale. Page loads regularly took 30 to 60 seconds. The site was frequently down for hours.

Users in the US migrated to MySpace (faster, more customisable, less broken). By the time Friendster had fixed its scaling problems - sometime in 2006. The network effect had moved, but there was no way back. Users do not return to a social network once they've moved.

The technical cause: Friendster was built in PHP backed by a MySQL database without any of the sharding, caching, or distributed-systems work that modern web companies treat as table stakes. They simply ran out of compute and engineering speed at exactly the wrong time. Several of the engineering hires who eventually rebuilt the platform have written about it; the consensus is that it was a salvageable architecture, but the recovery was nine months too late.

~ the southeast asia second life ~

While Friendster was dying in the US, it was, against expectation, growing in Southeast Asia. The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore adopted Friendster enthusiastically in 2005-2007. By 2008 over 90% of Friendster's user base was in Southeast Asia, because the company moved its headquarters to Kuala Lumpur in 2009.

Facebook's penetration in Southeast Asia accelerated in 2009-2010. Friendster bled users. In November 2010, MOL Global (a Malaysian payments company) bought Friendster for $40 million, hoping to use the user base. By June 2011, Friendster relaunched as a "social gaming network" focused on Filipino casual games. The social features were retired. The site became, briefly, one of the larger online gaming portals in the Philippines. It was never again a social network.

The 2015 shutdown of even the gaming features ended the Friendster brand's active relevance.

~ the void ~

The first-mover lesson. Friendster proved that social networks were viable. Then it proved that being first does not protect you. Both lessons have been re-taught dozens of times since (Path, Diaspora, Ello, Vero, Mastodon's struggles). Friendster was the original.

The Southeast Asia adaptation. The fact that an American product could have its real cultural moment in Manila and Kuala Lumpur was an early signal of how the global internet would diverge from the US tech-press narrative. Friendster's later years are a footnote in Silicon Valley history but a central artefact of mid-2000s Filipino youth culture.

The testimonial. Friendster had "testimonials", short messages your friends could write about you, displayed publicly on your profile. They were, a social proof system. Facebook removed them. They have not been replicated. We are missing them.

~ what people said ~

"my friendster profile in 2004 had 47 testimonials. they are gone. nothing remains. i have lived a whole life and the part where i was 17 has no archive.". a.r. 38

"jonathan abrams declined google's $30 million offer in 2003 and i think about that decision more often than i think about my own marriage."; m.k. 47

"in 2007 my filipino cousins talked about friendster constantly and my american friends had moved to facebook. it was the first time i understood that the internet was actually two different internets running in parallel.", d.t. 42