It wasn't just ops though, it was also their product strategy, algorithms, and scaling approach. One of the features of Friendster was that when you viewed som

It wasn't just ops though, it was also their product strategy, algorithms, and scaling approach. One of the features of Friendster was that when you viewed someone's profile, it would show you all of the ways you were connected to that person, out to I think four degrees. I'm not sure how they did this, but it didn't scale, and the result was that in I believe late 2003, you'd see everyone in a coffee shop with their laptops out waiting for a friendster page to load. It would take over ten minutes to load a page sometimes. The next year, MySpace started getting popular. MySpace didn't do all of this complicated social graph calculation at all. It would just tell you if you were friends or not. Naturally it was way faster, and despite other advantages of Friendster, it didn't take 10 minutes to load a page, and it took over completely until Facebook.