There’s a great story in the June edition of Inc. magazine entitled “How to Kill a Great Idea” about the demise of Friendster, the Web’s first social network.
One line, however, stood out:
The lure of Friendster - and, to a much greater extent, MySpace - was not the elegant web of connections but rather the opportunity to gawk at strangers. Rather than using Friendster to make dates, most of its users were simply cruising around and looking at the weird interests, pictures and blog-droppings of strangers … the free-spirited MySpace, which allowed anyone to look at anyone else’s profile and didn’t bother to calculate connections, took off.
Hmm, social networking should be, well, social. Crazy, huh? No doubt a cautionary tale for any business hoping to professionalize this platform.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:06 am
I disagree. Although there are a subset of people who do gawk at strangers, if everyone did that, there’d be no participation. If their theory is correct, then why is Facebook, which makes it hard to contact strangers, popular?
June 12th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Friendster is hardly a failure. With an Alexa ranking of 21 they will probably end up having a decent exit.
June 13th, 2007 at 1:37 am
Friendster may be dead in the USA, but its alive and kicking over in Asia.