Friendster: the first big social network, undone by slow pages and a war on its own users

What Friendster was

Jonathan Abrams launched Friendster in 2003 as a way to meet people through friends of friends. It grew to millions of users within months, raised money from top venture firms, and reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Google of around $30 million.

Growth became the problem. Calculating each user's extended network was computationally expensive, and as the user base grew the site slowed dramatically. By the mid-2000s most US users had moved on, though Friendster stayed popular in Southeast Asia until it was sold in 2009.

Why it failed

1. 1

   The signature feature didn't scale

   Friendster showed people how they were connected across several degrees of separation — a heavy calculation that grew rapidly with the size of the network. Pages that took many seconds to load turned a delightful product into a frustrating one at exactly the moment it was going mainstream.

2. 2

   Fighting users' creativity

   Users created 'Fakesters' — profiles for celebrities, places, and jokes — and the company deleted them, treating playful use as abuse. Myspace embraced customization, bands, and self-expression, and became the place people wanted to spend time.

3. 3

   Leadership churn and distraction

   Accounts of the period describe several changes of CEO and a board focused on long-term plans while the basic performance problem went unsolved. The product's single most urgent issue didn't get single-minded focus.