The company was looking for stability and kept losing market shares. The company lost the war even before it started due to stability issues. The market already had various clone sites of Friendster. Even the Friendster investor built a site called Tribe. The company failed completely to poach back users in such an evolving landscape of this challenging industry.
Right decision making is part of management. The company lacked basic skills to work things out. They had a market fit product, they had users for the product and also the revenue. The company was highly mismanaged and misbalanced. For the success of social networks first and foremost it is important to focus on being social.
This is only meant to create and bring in changes to fit in the market. Users eventually got bored out. Here a very important lesson needs to be learnt from Facebook. Facebook first lured the audience with profile building and then they stopped playing around.
For a long-term success which is still clearly visible they brought up a feature of news feed. This feature had a great importance in their success, it brought everything together by putting the friends updates, shares and discussions to the front. People started getting interested as they could easily see the whereabouts of their connections. Problem not only lied in bringing new features but also in their focus and timing. Company lost track soon after its launch for not being tactful in decision making.
Do tell us all your thoughts in the comments section below, we look forward to reading all the comments in the section below. Published in Blog and Startup Cemetery. The style that you write make it very comfortable to read. And the theme you use, wow. That is a really good combination. And I am wondering what is the name of the template you use?
Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Why Did Friendster Shutdown? Here is the complete analysis! Published September 8, by teambizzbucket. What was Friendster? Who founded Friendster? His eventual replacement became Scott M. Sassa who previously held the role of president at NBC Entertainment. In May , less than a year after his appointment, Sassa was already being released from his duties. Furthermore, Friendster laid off 5 out of its 55 employees.
Kwon was able to at least partially stop the bleeding. Under his leadership, Friendster completely redesigned its website, copying many of the features that made Myspace so popular such as the ability to publish blog posts.
Despite the successful overhaul, Kwon only lasted in his position for about six months. In December , he and many of his colleagues decided to depart from Friendster. The company even had troubles meeting payroll. As a result, rumors about a potential sale began to emerge. After all, Friendster still had a valuable brand with millions of registered users.
Kwon was ultimately replaced by Kent Lindstrom who initially joined Myspace as Chief Financial Officer right after it was founded. With Lindstrom at the helm of Friendster, it began doubling down on the building blocks that worked. The company launched different language versions of its website and even opened local offices in countries like the Philippines.
Next, Friendster successfully filed for a variety of patents that it had previously applied for. Over the course of the next two years, Friendster had registered five patents that were covering general social media usage. Investors also began to regain trust in the company. Additional features such as a classmate function to connect with people from high school or college or fan pages to follow artists and other celebrities added further appeal to the site.
In December , Friendster even launched its very own developer platform, allowing others to create and advertise apps on its platform. The move mimicked previously launched platforms by Facebook as well as Myspace. At that time, Friendster had close to 75 million users , up from 45 million just a year prior. Meanwhile, its San Francisco office had only a handful of people left. Over the course of , Friendster began shopping itself around Asia, making it clear that it was up for grabs.
Those advances finally came to fruition in December Throughout , it became evident why MOL decided to acquire Friendster. Meanwhile, MOL had some different plans for Friendster. The same month it sold its patents to Facebook, Friendster added a social games portal, dubbed Friendster Games , offering free MMO massively multiplayer online games.
The site continued to be live up until June when it was eventually shut down. In November , Friendster swung the door open for creativity when it went to an open platform system. Essentially, it's much easier for developers to create, upgrade and market their applications to the Friendster community. For more on the open platform, see the Competition and Future of Friendster. Can you have , friends?
And what exactly is a "friend," anyway? Find out in the next section. Like a community, Friendster lets you connect with people you know and network out from there, building your web of contacts. Those connections are called friends. Think of it like the game six degrees of separation. David is the link that binds them. There's no limit to how many friends you can have. They can be family, lifelong pals, classmates, business contacts or that random guy you bonded with over truffles on chocoholics.
Now that you're popular, what do you do with it? Some Friendsters are just looking for a place to swap photos with friends and invite them to parties. Others may be looking for dates, while plenty of folks use Friendster to find jobs and network professionally. As your network grows you may find yourself asking, are all these people really my friends? Uber-popular Karen Kong has , friends.
Featured Friends lets you show off your BFFs, and sites like Facebook allow you to rank friends by who's smartest, funniest or most stylish. What actually constitutes a friend is subjective depending on your definition of the word, but most would agree it requires a certain level of intimacy you just can't achieve with , people. Even adding co-workers and acquaintances pushes the definition of friendship.
Sites like professional social network LinkedIn offer a way to keep them separate also a good idea if you're not too keen on your boss seeing your photos and posts. For now, ranking by Featured Friends is the clearest way to differentiate.
What if you decide someone's no longer a friend? Can you ever get rid of them? Say our friends Mary and Kumar have a fight and want to "break up. Bye-bye Kumar! Blocking friends is one thing, but what about stalkers and Big Brother?
Read on to find out if Friendster is sharing your personal details. As social networking has ballooned, so have concerns about privacy and online security. Friendster claims it "does not send spam or sell email addresses" [source: Friendster.
Certain personal data name, e-mail address, birth date, etc. As is common in the Internet world , Friendster may share non-identifiable data such as user patterns to help advertisers target their audiences more efficiently. With the exception of a few basics viewable to all, who sees your profile is largely up to you. As we mentioned earlier, blocking individual users from accessing your profile is one way to avoid unwanted solicitation.
Adjust privacy settings to filter out certain countries, limit access to "friends-only" or second-degree access friends of friends. The public setting means it's viewable to all. And what about lying, is that cool? In the past Friendster has discouraged the use of "Fakester" profiles, whether they were pet pages or rock bands. This tactic backfired when users complained and groups and fan pages became popular.
Hence the creation of the Fan Profile. The more pressing concern is safety. Providing misleading personal details or hiding under pseudonyms is a common tactic for spammers, marketers, stalkers and other predators. But the flip side works too for protecting oneself from those predators. But it should be noted that there's really no surefire way to tell fact from fiction in the world of virtual personalities.
The only confirmation Friendster requires is that you enter your birth date and year when you sign up, which can be fudged with a little basic math. You must also confirm that you are eligible by agreeing to their terms of service by marking a check box. So is underage use a major problem for Friendster?
There are probably some offenders. But applications like Classmates , which connects college students, and the ability to add school profiles to individual pages, makes Friendster far more useful for older kids and adults than the underage.
Next, is Friendster a has-been? Stirring up controversy is the "Who's Viewed Me" feature, which allows users to find out who's been checking out their profiles. This is great for the guy wondering if his old girlfriend still pines for him. Not so great for the ex who would die of embarrassment if found out. But you can easily switch your setting to "anonymous," thereby preventing anyone from knowing you viewed them.
Despite essentially starting the social networking boom, Friendster has had a tough time in the industry. Like most non-subscription-based Web sites and social networks, Friendster aims to make money by selling advertising to companies who want to reach their users. But as of June , Friendster still hasn't posted a profit, though it says it is close [source: Marshall ].
In addition, as we mentioned in the introduction of this article, competitors like Facebook and Bebo have won over larger and younger fan bases. In , MySpace blew past Friendster in the U.
Several factors may be to blame:. Can this maligned community recapture the magic? It may already have in Asia. In fact, Friendster is the no. Further expansion into China and other Asian markets is not far off, though Friendster isn't alone in tapping those wells. Applications such as quizzes and games help keep them coming back for more, and planned features like mobile texting aim to expand Friendster's reach into new markets and technologies.
The site has also improved technically and beefed up its efforts at getting page views. The aforementioned page load and outage issues have lessened, and it's easier to see who's in your network and how you're connected with a new and improved family tree "graph server" feature.
E-mail notifications and live profile updates for new messages and friend activity generate more page views.
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