Apparently it is “going gangbusters” in the Philippines and southeast asia, 115 million members worldwide, but considered a has-been in the US.
I know nothing specific about any of these sites, so I have to ask: What do the others have that Friendster doesn’t, and why can’t Friendster just add that feature and be back in the game here?
I think there’s a heavy network effect at play here. It’s not so much a feature or lack thereof, it’s “where are your friends?” You sign onto the service that your friends use, and vice versa, and eventually one site is dominant in an area.
I’m not sure why facebook has taken over in the US while friendster (which everyone I knew used in the early 2000s) has fallen off in the US but taken off in SE Asia.
I was late on the Friendster train when it came around the first time, and all I remember was that the service was awful. It was as slow as molasses.
Everyone abandoned it for MySpace, which seemed to have a better grip on hardware. Then Facebook came along, which had the hardware AND the user interface thing down (altho, IIRC, Friendster had a UI similar to Facebook).
I always thought of Friendster as ‘the slower Myspace.’
Only signed up for an account so that I could see some online dating folks sites.
My kid’s aunt in the philippines uses it and keeps trying to get me to be more active on it.
Makes me wonder whatever happened to things like Geocities and Yahoo blogs and a few other free services like that you could have used like those others. So many places were handing out free pages and some had visitor logs etc.
In two or three years the questionwill probably be ‘I wonder what happened to all those services like Facebook and Friendster’.
The free business model is hard to make pay. There is the added problem that a lot of these services are based upon the hip factor of the month. Lose that and your business is suddenly gone.
Slee
Yeah I wonder will facebook die a death along the lines of myspace, friendster and bebo? I think though it is more popular than any of those other sites were at their peek.
Twitter has little do do with Myspace, Facebook, and Friendster, other than lots of people use it.
I wouldn’t be surprise to find someone writing a front end application that would allow you to follow/view/update a number of these page, all from one place. Kind of like the apps that came out to let you use a number of IM programs all from one place.
I believe Bebo tried to do this but I think it is still dying.