I think Facebook has been very successful with its copycat strategy over the years. A recent example is how they copied stories from Snapchat within Instagram and made Instagram stories more popular. Instagram stories was able to integrate similar features, had a better advertising platforms for brands, and better download and upload speeds in comparison to Snapchat most prominently noticed when traveling abroad. You must be logged in to post a comment.
Skip to content. The HBS Digital Initiative brings together perspectives across disciplines to help people understand how technology is transforming organizations and the greater world. Want to learn more about technology and organizations? Email Password Remember Me Lost your password? Assignment: Platform Business Challenges. Student comments on Before Facebook there was… Friendster? How come Facebook just celebrated its 10th year anniversary , its influence on our daily lives undeniable , while Friendster is the butt of every social media manager's jokes?
READ: Facebook lets users take a 'look back'. No less than Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has decided to explain why, after years of avoiding the topic. In a recent interview with Seth Fiegerman on Mashable , he confessed that Friendster's downfall was a complicated matter fraught with many missed opportunities. Do you still remember Friendster's beta version? Image from gadel.
Among the things Facebook is known for are a its birth on a college campus, and its initial spreading across other college campuses; b its Newsfeed; and c its social graph. Believe it or not, but Adams claims that some of Friendster's plans included a college edition, a newsfeed, and a social graph -- all ahead of Facebook.
But these plans remained just that, only to surface through their competitor in the future. Friendster suffered through many technology issues, but they weren't addressed because the site's investors wanted to focus on other concerns.
He argues that Friendster fizzled not only because it fell victim to mismanagement, but because he embraced a system that is designed to create far more failures than successes. Friendster, he believes, was not simply a singular failure, but a systematic one. And he's determined that things be different with his new Web venture, Socializr. Abrams is not the only one who feels this way.
It's a point that even some investors are willing to concede. It's fine for the VCs themselves, who reap healthy management fees regardless of the outcome. And it's fine for the network of professional managers who bounce from start-up to start-up, earning well wherever they go. But it isn't much good for an entrepreneur who has a promising idea--and who would prefer odds that are better than 20 to 2. Spolsky believes that working with a VC imposes a level of risk that someone prepared to invest his life--not to mention his life savings--in a single enterprise simply should not tolerate.
F riendster never felt like a long shot to Abrams, who seemed to understand Silicon Valley as well as just about anyone. He spent a year and a half at Netscape, writing code for the Navigator Web browser and immersing himself in the culture of the time and place, becoming a regular at meetings of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and the Software Development Forum.
Abrams left Netscape in , and nine months later started HotLinks, an early foray into what is now called "social search. Over the course of a year and a half, HotLinks attracted , registered users, but it ran out of money in the wake of the technology collapse. In the spring of , HotLinks merged with a British software company, and Abrams left to work for another start-up.
As he suffered through the dot-com bust, Abrams began mulling a new idea: software that would somehow integrate one's online and offline identities. Abrams saw that the cultural perception of online dating had changed. Friendster crystallized in the summer of while Abrams was walking with a friend in a Santa Clara park.
But instead of simply advertising their interests and good looks, users could link their profiles to those of their friends, creating a network of connections that would mirror those that existed in the real world. His friend liked the idea, and Abrams started work immediately. Three months later, he had a prototype, which he posted on the fallow server of a friend's failed dot-com.
He sent invitations to about 20 of his closest friends, unsure of what would happen next. Abrams's invention--which would be awarded patent number 7,, four years later as a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system"--was far more enticing than he initially imagined.
As an online dating tool, it represented a potential improvement over Match. But beyond its applications in dating, Abrams's software was compelling as a pure idea. The beauty of Friendster was its exhaustively complete network.
Every time a homepage loaded, Friendster's servers calculated a single user's connection to other users within four degrees of separation, which could mean hundreds of thousands of individuals. Because the network was constantly changing as new users joined and connected with one another, these calculations had to happen on the fly--in what would eventually amount to trillions of rapid calculations. The effect was to give users a vivid sense of how they fit into their social groups as well as into the larger world.
Abrams, it seemed, had created a piece of software that could tell us who we were. P rototype in hand, Abrams began looking for seed funding. Abrams's hosts had no idea what he was talking about but agreed to invest a few thousand dollars anyway. What happened next, says Lloyd, who now lives in Seattle, was "one of the most exciting times of my business life.
He opened Friendster in March The site grew virally as Abrams's friends invited their friends, and by June it had , registered members. Four months later, there were more than two million, generating some 10 million page views per day. The growth presented immediate engineering headaches. In theory, Abrams's intricate network was a beautiful thing. In practice, the constant calculations, which were being continuously served on millions of homepages, required more than a terrabyte of expensive RAM memory.
By late , load times regularly clocked in at over a minute and users were beginning to complain in blogs and forums. Abrams's software would need to be scaled somehow. Simply buying enough servers to keep up with the growth was a major challenge. The problem might have been solved if someone had reworked the software to ignore distant connections--for example, by calculating only connections between friends.
But Friendster's engineers were so preoccupied with day-to-day slowdowns that they neglected to step back and ask what was causing them. Abrams, for his part, was distracted by business needs: hiring, recruiting investors, looking at partnerships, and--most time-consuming of all--public relations.
Between March and October of Friendster was all over the media. Time called it one of the best inventions of and Entertainment Weekly named Abrams "Friendliest Man of the Year" in its annual "Breakout Stars" issue. With no outside PR help and no marketing personnel, Abrams handled everything from talk show appearances to chatting with reporters.
While the press coverage was exciting--and undeniably helpful in building Friendster's user base and increasing its attractiveness to a burgeoning online ad marketplace--it monopolized his attention, preventing him from making even small fixes that would have dramatically improved the site's performance. Around the same time, Friendster was also able to raise its first-ever institutional round of funding. Abrams declined since he believed that Friendster would be worth significantly more in the future.
The board, comprised of Valley legends including John Doerr or Bob Kagle, became increasingly dissatisfied with Abrams and his antics. The entrepreneur was seen frequenting parties instead of focusing to fix the many problems that befuddled Friendster.
In April , the company announced that Abrams stepped down from his role as CEO and was being replaced by Tim Koogle who had just joined its board. Koogle himself only lasted three months in his role, oftentimes not even being seen at the office.
His eventual replacement became Scott M. Sassa who previously held the role of president at NBC Entertainment. In May , less than a year after his appointment, Sassa was already being released from his duties. Furthermore, Friendster laid off 5 out of its 55 employees. Kwon was able to at least partially stop the bleeding. Under his leadership, Friendster completely redesigned its website, copying many of the features that made Myspace so popular such as the ability to publish blog posts.
Despite the successful overhaul, Kwon only lasted in his position for about six months. In December , he and many of his colleagues decided to depart from Friendster. The company even had troubles meeting payroll. As a result, rumors about a potential sale began to emerge. After all, Friendster still had a valuable brand with millions of registered users.
Kwon was ultimately replaced by Kent Lindstrom who initially joined Myspace as Chief Financial Officer right after it was founded. With Lindstrom at the helm of Friendster, it began doubling down on the building blocks that worked. The company launched different language versions of its website and even opened local offices in countries like the Philippines.
Next, Friendster successfully filed for a variety of patents that it had previously applied for.
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