13 ms·

How to Kill a Great Idea

99 points by faramarz 17y ago

vl 17y ago
Friendster, the first online social network Factually inaccurate? Friendster was launched in 2002, LiveJournal, for example, in 1999.
benwalther 17y ago
Great article, and a good moral. It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.
- lincolnq 17y ago
  I knew almost nothing about Friendster and I found the article captivating. Maybe you already knew the important bits?
- gridspy 17y ago
  Some stories are written in newspaper style like you describe. This is written in a storytelling style - much more informative for most of the audience who know very little of friendship.
- __bjoernd 17y ago
  Having not followed Friendster and its history, I found this a pretty compelling read.
hristov 17y ago
This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam. So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open each message and discover it is spam. The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.
- leftnode 17y ago
  That's a great take-away I think. I think that is one of the reasons Facebook was so successful. I've been a member of Facebook since 2004 and I can't remember a single piece of spam I've ever seen through it. In 2004 when I joined, it was a pretty simple, no-AJAX standard PHP site and worked very quickly. From there, it just took off and they were able to hire some of the best engineers and server architecture people out there.
  - nfriedly 17y ago
    I've gotten 5-10 pieces of spam through facebook in the last year or two, but it's all been from non-techie friends who had their account phished. So at least I was able to help them clean it up and (hopefully) learn how to avoid it in the future.
- mpfefferle 17y ago
  When your company has no revenue, the "obvious" answer is to sell as hard as you can until your cashflow positive. But it's not going to help unless the product actually works. This seems to be the gist of the comments here, but I'd like to propose a third requirement: operations. Ultimately, a business has to become self-sustaining, and that can't happen until the acts of building the product and selling the product become sufficiently well defined that they can be handed over to a professional staff. (See also: E-Myth)
albertsun 17y ago
My favorite bit of the article. [Abrams] was particularly vexed by the company's apparent obsession with partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with AOL," he recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his chairmanship.
- staunch 17y ago
  Straight out of the The Business Man handbook. What does running a company mean? It means doing Business Deals with other Business Men. The rest of the time you need to sign Business Papers in your Business Chair while making Business Calls. <grumble>
faramarz 17y ago
In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the companies growth explaining what Friendster is. http://bit.ly/9EAhU9 http://bit.ly/9EAhU9
- staunch 17y ago
  http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229 FYI: URL shorteners are neither required nor preferred on HN.
  - faramarz 17y ago
    gotcha. thanks
DotSauce 17y ago
Here's a thought. Friendster failed in part because he got the name wrong. And his new business, Socializr - much worse. Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of his story.
gridspy 17y ago
I think this is a great warning for those who think that VC funding immediately equals success. Eating your ramen noodles for a while gives you time to get good foundations in place before things start moving too fast. It made me feel much better about bootstrapping Gridspy
necrecious 17y ago
The print friendly version is hard to read due to unbroken lines. The normal version has too many pages splits. Does anyone know a good javascript commandlet that will apply good style to plain text?
- ashot 17y ago
  http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- dflock 17y ago
  You probably want this awesome little thing: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ Makes most any website really, really, _readable_. One of goals when I build my own sites is to make it so I don't want to switch readability on when I'm using it.
python123 17y ago
Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right from the start by restricting it to colleges. I'm sure people wanted to open it up sooner, but the talented young leaders of Facebook knew that the next big thing would be determined by how young people choose to adopt it. Old people would follow like cattle later on, which they did. Facebook even made sure to hire young talent at the start because any bad hire would hurt the company when it was small. If you haven't made something of yourself by 30, don't think you're gonna quit your job as a career software engineer and come up with the next big thing. If you wanna do a start-up, you're only chance is to create a lifestyle business or maybe have a mild exit, which is still pretty good.
- devinj 17y ago
  I may not be old, but I still find your blatant ageism disturbing (I would say only slightly disturbing, except that you've taken this offensive viewpoint to something of an extreme-- so it's not slight at all). "Old people" can be just as hip, modern, and trendy as the rest. Sure, it doesn't fit the stereotype-- maybe it doesn't even fit the trends (I wouldn't know)-- but they can be. Not hiring people just because they're old is illegal and immoral (at least as much as discriminating on any blanket classification is, such as race, gender, religion, etc.).
- iamwil 17y ago
  both successes and failures don't only have one cause.
- Hates_ 17y ago
  "Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders." Yes, because everyone who uses the internet is young and because every great company is run by someone young. I honestly can't believe I'm reading a comment that seems to believe the web/business world exists only within a bubble of young people. A huge proportion of great businesses are/were started by "old" people and there are plenty of examples of tech businesses that have been spectacularly successful that were also started by "old" people.
fh 17y ago
Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.
- kgrin 17y ago
  Friendster launched circa 2002; I don't have the etymology of "Web 2.0" committed to memory, but it's safe to say the silly naming really kicked in much later.
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    If anything, "Friendster" is what started that trend.
    - paul9290 17y ago
      Ever heard of Napster?
      - stretchwithme 17y ago
        he he. good one, paulster
      - jfarmer 17y ago
        WHY YES.
mixmax 17y ago
That was an amazing read. And it shows that the winners get to write the history books.
uriel 17y ago
> Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi (NYSE:HIT) storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months. Anyone knows the technical details? What was Friendster originally written in, and in what did they rewrite it?
- wayne 17y ago
  Java to PHP: http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/ http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/
jeremymims 17y ago
The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.
- jon_dahl 17y ago
  Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed? [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster
  - jeremymims 17y ago
    I seem to remember there were a number of news articles reporting the $100 million figure. I'm not privy to any inside information on this so I don't really know the answer. Tech Crunch is probably the most reliable for this kind of information. A few of the $100 million articles: http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-100m-deal/ http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-1... http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-cautionary-tale-ends-in-100-million-sale/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-caution... http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unknown-asian-group-buy-friendster-100-million/ http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unk... http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friendster-on-the-verge-of-100-million-buyout http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friends...

99 points by faramarz 17y ago

vl 17y ago

Friendster, the first online social network Factually inaccurate? Friendster was launched in 2002, LiveJournal, for example, in 1999.

benwalther 17y ago

Great article, and a good moral. It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.

lincolnq 17y ago
I knew almost nothing about Friendster and I found the article captivating. Maybe you already knew the important bits?
gridspy 17y ago
Some stories are written in newspaper style like you describe. This is written in a storytelling style - much more informative for most of the audience who know very little of friendship.
__bjoernd 17y ago
Having not followed Friendster and its history, I found this a pretty compelling read.

hristov 17y ago

This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam. So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open each message and discover it is spam. The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.

leftnode 17y ago
That's a great take-away I think. I think that is one of the reasons Facebook was so successful. I've been a member of Facebook since 2004 and I can't remember a single piece of spam I've ever seen through it. In 2004 when I joined, it was a pretty simple, no-AJAX standard PHP site and worked very quickly. From there, it just took off and they were able to hire some of the best engineers and server architecture people out there.
- nfriedly 17y ago
  I've gotten 5-10 pieces of spam through facebook in the last year or two, but it's all been from non-techie friends who had their account phished. So at least I was able to help them clean it up and (hopefully) learn how to avoid it in the future.
mpfefferle 17y ago
When your company has no revenue, the "obvious" answer is to sell as hard as you can until your cashflow positive. But it's not going to help unless the product actually works. This seems to be the gist of the comments here, but I'd like to propose a third requirement: operations. Ultimately, a business has to become self-sustaining, and that can't happen until the acts of building the product and selling the product become sufficiently well defined that they can be handed over to a professional staff. (See also: E-Myth)

albertsun 17y ago

My favorite bit of the article. [Abrams] was particularly vexed by the company's apparent obsession with partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with AOL," he recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his chairmanship.

staunch 17y ago
Straight out of the The Business Man handbook. What does running a company mean? It means doing Business Deals with other Business Men. The rest of the time you need to sign Business Papers in your Business Chair while making Business Calls. <grumble>

faramarz 17y ago

In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the companies growth explaining what Friendster is. http://bit.ly/9EAhU9 http://bit.ly/9EAhU9

staunch 17y ago
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229 FYI: URL shorteners are neither required nor preferred on HN.
- faramarz 17y ago
  gotcha. thanks

DotSauce 17y ago

Here's a thought. Friendster failed in part because he got the name wrong. And his new business, Socializr - much worse. Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of his story.

gridspy 17y ago

I think this is a great warning for those who think that VC funding immediately equals success. Eating your ramen noodles for a while gives you time to get good foundations in place before things start moving too fast. It made me feel much better about bootstrapping Gridspy

necrecious 17y ago

The print friendly version is hard to read due to unbroken lines. The normal version has too many pages splits. Does anyone know a good javascript commandlet that will apply good style to plain text?

ashot 17y ago
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
dflock 17y ago
You probably want this awesome little thing: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ Makes most any website really, really, _readable_. One of goals when I build my own sites is to make it so I don't want to switch readability on when I'm using it.

python123 17y ago

Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right from the start by restricting it to colleges. I'm sure people wanted to open it up sooner, but the talented young leaders of Facebook knew that the next big thing would be determined by how young people choose to adopt it. Old people would follow like cattle later on, which they did. Facebook even made sure to hire young talent at the start because any bad hire would hurt the company when it was small. If you haven't made something of yourself by 30, don't think you're gonna quit your job as a career software engineer and come up with the next big thing. If you wanna do a start-up, you're only chance is to create a lifestyle business or maybe have a mild exit, which is still pretty good.

devinj 17y ago
I may not be old, but I still find your blatant ageism disturbing (I would say only slightly disturbing, except that you've taken this offensive viewpoint to something of an extreme-- so it's not slight at all). "Old people" can be just as hip, modern, and trendy as the rest. Sure, it doesn't fit the stereotype-- maybe it doesn't even fit the trends (I wouldn't know)-- but they can be. Not hiring people just because they're old is illegal and immoral (at least as much as discriminating on any blanket classification is, such as race, gender, religion, etc.).
iamwil 17y ago
both successes and failures don't only have one cause.
Hates_ 17y ago
"Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders." Yes, because everyone who uses the internet is young and because every great company is run by someone young. I honestly can't believe I'm reading a comment that seems to believe the web/business world exists only within a bubble of young people. A huge proportion of great businesses are/were started by "old" people and there are plenty of examples of tech businesses that have been spectacularly successful that were also started by "old" people.

fh 17y ago

Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.

kgrin 17y ago
Friendster launched circa 2002; I don't have the etymology of "Web 2.0" committed to memory, but it's safe to say the silly naming really kicked in much later.
- jfarmer 17y ago
  If anything, "Friendster" is what started that trend.
  - paul9290 17y ago
    Ever heard of Napster?
    - stretchwithme 17y ago
      he he. good one, paulster
    - jfarmer 17y ago
      WHY YES.

mixmax 17y ago

That was an amazing read. And it shows that the winners get to write the history books.

uriel 17y ago

> Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi (NYSE:HIT) storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months. Anyone knows the technical details? What was Friendster originally written in, and in what did they rewrite it?

wayne 17y ago
Java to PHP: http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/ http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/

jeremymims 17y ago

The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.

jon_dahl 17y ago
Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed? [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster
- jeremymims 17y ago
  I seem to remember there were a number of news articles reporting the $100 million figure. I'm not privy to any inside information on this so I don't really know the answer. Tech Crunch is probably the most reliable for this kind of information. A few of the $100 million articles: http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-100m-deal/ http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-1... http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-cautionary-tale-ends-in-100-million-sale/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-caution... http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unknown-asian-group-buy-friendster-100-million/ http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unk... http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friendster-on-the-verge-of-100-million-buyout http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friends...