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"While Friendster is reemerging as a dominant force overseas in the field of social networking, time wasn’t long ago when the once-mighty company was on its las
by ardit33 18y ago
"While Friendster is reemerging as a dominant force overseas in the field of social networking, time wasn’t long ago when the once-mighty company was on its last legs. A New York Times article wonders “what happened to Friendster?” and chastises it for passing up “a billion dollar opportunity” during the height of its success. Many have privately speculated that there was no one thing Friendster did wrong. Rather, they believe, people just use whatever site their friends use, which, eventually, became MySpace and Facebook instead. Regardless, Friendster boasts one of the more high-profile “fall from grace” stories in recent years."
That's kind of wrong. All my friends in the east coast were in friendster first, but the site became so slow and painful to navigate or do anything that even something like myspace was such a refresh.
The other blunder that Friendster did at the time, was to allow people see who visited your profile. I bet their pageviews dropped overnight.
I think this is a classical case of bad execution ruining a startup.
- themenace 18y ago> The other blunder that Friendster did at the time, was to allow people see who visited your profile. I bet their pageviews dropped overnight. Would you explain this a bit more please? Why would it be bad to let users see who's visiting them?
- vaksel 18y agono more stalking
- parker 18y agoIt's simple user psychology. So much of traffic on social networking sites is lurking around on other people's pages, especially those that you're 'interested' in. I'd rather not let other people know that I've been looking at their page, especially when I've been looking at their page a lot. If I know that they know, it dis-incentivizes me from surfing around at all, killing page views. In other words, social networks need to do everything they can to nurture their creepers.
- nostrademons 18y agoFaceBook had a huge blunder a couple months ago when it seemed like typing a space in the search field apparently autocompleted the people who most recently looked at your profile page. It was never confirmed that that was what was happening, but people were massively creeped out and they fixed the bug within a day.