friendster « Columbus Underground Messageboard

Columbus Underground Messageboard » General Columbus Discussion » Everyday Chit Chat

friendster

[18 posts] [11 contributors]

Topic Rating:

(Total Ratings: )
Rate this topic:

Started 8 years ago by brothermarcus
Latest reply from groundrules

Tags:

brothermarcus
West Siiiide
Login to Send PM

i've been checking this out for a few days and this is one of the most entertaining things i've ever checked out - it's supposed to be like this 6-degrees of separation-slash-dating-site but people have made all of these fake accounts for Elvis, Wesley Willis, David Hasselhoff... it's really cracking me up to see how creative people are getting...
if you want to check it out go to friendster.com - look me up under the email jimmybreece@yahoo.com and it should unlock a whole weird world for you...

Posted 8 years ago #
ballbrite
Columbus
Login to Send PM

Look at the profile for Justin Timberlake...had me laughing out loud.

Posted 8 years ago #
Walker
The KLD / Downtown
Login to Send PM

Bumping a 6-Year-Old Thread from the archives... for good reason:

Get the Flash Video

Posted 2 years ago #
cc

Login to Send PM

IC

Thanks Walker,

CU was great while it lasted. Good luck in your future endeavors...

nevar sign a lease on Gay St. ....

Posted 2 years ago #
cc

Login to Send PM

;)

atleast there will always be Myspace

Posted 2 years ago #
Lakee911
Clintonville (South)
Login to Send PM

There used to be something called Six Degrees @ sixdegrees.com about 10-12 years ago. It was some sort of social people linking experiment and the precurser to all of the current social networking sites. I'm not sure why it folded though.

Here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com

Posted 2 years ago #
JonMyers
HCMC ✈
Login to Send PM

A Malaysian payments company purchased Friendster earlier this month for about $30 million:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/15/friendster-valued-at-just-26-4-million-in-sale/

Friendster may be the biggest blown Internet startup opportunity of the last decade.

---

Facebook was recently valued at $11 billion.

First to market usually does not win the big money.

Posted 2 years ago #
JaredThompson
Manhattan Beach, CA
Login to Send PM

JonMyers wrote >>
First to market usually does not win the big money.

I'm sorry for being skeptical, but is that really the conventional wisdom? I've often heard, "be first or be better" when it comes to websites.

Posted 2 years ago #
JonMyers
HCMC ✈
Login to Send PM

I think it depends on the site and vertical, but I don't think first always wins. Sometimes it does, but not always. Especially with disruptive technologies and the disruptive paradigms social technologies have introduced.

I could probably talk myself into either point of view regarding first to market or not.

On the first mover note. Craig's list is an example of a first mover advantage and win. eBay tried to compete with CL by building Kijiji and can't win. eBay couldn't catch them with a 26% equity stake it purchased through a disgruntled ex CL employee, proprietary knowledge it acquired through that equity, hordes of cash, and an army of developers.

I think the Kijiji failure can be summed up simply. They're competing on the same paradigm. Free listings. They thought they could catch Craig's List with a prettier, 'more intuitive UI. Craig's List is as ugly as a pipe wrench, but it doesn't matter. Kijiji is the same paradigm and a prettier UI doesn't solve a pain point.

In terms of first mover advantage, I talk to a lot of people who have business ideas and their test as to whether or not they'll execute on that idea is "has someone else thought of this idea"... You can almost guarantee someone has thought of it.

Even though it's cheesy (paradigm shift), I go back to the idea of the business paradigm. Is there enough of a shift to where that shift creates an enormous amount of value and alleviates a major pain point. If so, you're 10% there.. :)

Posted 2 years ago #
bababoohi

Login to Send PM

JonMyers wrote >>
I think it depends on the site and vertical, but I don't think first always wins. Sometimes it does, but not always. Especially with disruptive technologies and the disruptive paradigms social technologies have introduced.
I could probably talk myself into either point of view regarding first to market or not.
On the first mover note. Craig's list is an example of a first mover advantage and win. eBay tried to compete with CL by building Kijiji and can't win. eBay couldn't catch them with a 26% equity stake it purchased through a disgruntled ex CL employee, proprietary knowledge it acquired through that equity, hordes of cash, and an army of developers.
I think the Kijiji failure can be summed up simply. They're competing on the same paradigm. Free listings. They thought they could catch Craig's List with a prettier, 'more intuitive UI. Craig's List is as ugly as a pipe wrench, but it doesn't matter. Kijiji is the same paradigm and a prettier UI doesn't solve a pain point.
In terms of first mover advantage, I talk to a lot of people who have business ideas and their test as to whether or not they'll execute on that idea is "has someone else thought of this idea"... You can almost guarantee someone has thought of it.
Even though it's cheesy (paradigm shift), I go back to the idea of the business paradigm. Is there enough of a shift to where that shift creates an enormous amount of value and alleviates a major pain point. If so, you're 10% there.. :)

What is the pain point exactly? To me the pain point with CL is the UI, which is what makes Kajiji's failure so interesting. I find this to be an interesting conversation but may have missed that point. Thanks.

Posted 2 years ago #
JonMyers
HCMC ✈
Login to Send PM

It's my personal opinion that the Craig's List UI works (as ugly as it may be) and therefore is not a pain point, though it is painful for me to look at. Works meaning it's easy to post on there and easy enough to search on the site for the 100 million/ month who show up to the site.

The biggest pain point on CL to me is trust, not the UI.

----

Thinking of pain here.

The biggest early pain point for Friendster was scalability. The lack of it killed them. Myspace came around and kinda addressed that (not really, but) and then IMO their biggest pain point was spam. My guess on the biggest pain point for Facebook would be information/ application overload. Twitter has taken the lead on that and now Twitter is becoming a social spam machine.. :) - just throwing ideas out there.

Posted 2 years ago #
michaelcoyote
!seabus
Login to Send PM

JonMyers wrote >>
Craig's List is as ugly as a pipe wrench, but it doesn't matter.

Well that's kind of the thing.. It *is* essentially a pipe wrench. I don't need the prettiest wrench to get the job done, and I'm not going to need it too often, but it has to fit the job, and I think CL does that pretty well. The Stillson pipe wrench patent was issued in the 1860's, and the design hasn't changed much in all that time. I'm sure that others have tried to improve the "interface" but really it's hard to sell a minor improvement on "pretty damn good". I have a Stillson pipe wrench, and it still works very well when I need to do work on threaded pipe.

CL is very much like that pipe wrench. It works pretty well when I need it..

There was an interesting writeup in wired a few months ago that might be worth the read:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all

ETA: On thing that I find interesting about CL is that they hide their APIs and keep their data pretty locked down. It's not possible that I've seen to search, say multiple cites, and CL has never shown up on Google that I can recall. Not that I've needed to do either much, but still

Posted 2 years ago #
JonMyers
HCMC ✈
Login to Send PM

MC - That's it for me.. It does get the job done.

Posted 2 years ago #
bababoohi

Login to Send PM

JonMyers wrote >>
MC - That's it for me.. It does get the job done.

I suppose that's a good point. It gets the job done b/c it's a simple job. Which is why it may be limited at some point but for it's purpose, it works. And since people don't use it every day, there's no major outcry for a change.

Posted 2 years ago #
michaelcoyote
!seabus
Login to Send PM

Missed this, heh

JonMyers wrote >>
Thinking of pain here.
The biggest early pain point for Friendster was scalability. The lack of it killed them. Myspace came around and kinda addressed that (not really, but) and then IMO their biggest pain point was spam. My guess on the biggest pain point for Facebook would be information/ application overload.

Yeah.. Freindster really bit it on scalability.. You didn't mention it, but Orkut had a scalability problem as well, and then later a spam problem..

Myspace just got too damned ugly to look at..

Facebook? App spam is pretty horrible.. It doesn't help things that some of the app developers are scammers to boot

JonMyers wrote >> Twitter has taken the lead on that and now Twitter is becoming a social spam machine.. :) - just throwing ideas out there.

I've had very little problem with spam on Twitter, but then again I don't follow just anyone. I also go through and block followers that are spammers, SEO "experts", "marketing experts", etc. It takes about 10 minutes every 2 weeks, and it's made my experience with twitter pretty spam free.

Posted 2 years ago #
Tenzo
Chicago Lakeshore
Login to Send PM

thought that place dies in the 90s

Posted 2 years ago #
JaredThompson
Manhattan Beach, CA
Login to Send PM

@michaelcoyote: The Wired article was informative! Thanks for posting.

@jonmyers: Craigslist is an intriguing example. Thanks for the stimulating discussion. The newspapers see themselves as first to the online classified ad market. Craigslist came later and that coincides with the statement, "First to market usually does not win the big money".

Posted 2 years ago #
groundrules

Login to Send PM

NPR story on Myspace:

"There's no reason why these guys should have succeeded Ã¢â‚¬â€ they had terrible technology; their ideas weren't so unique; they were executed poorly; their site is still a mess. And yet a lot of their success was because, in the early days, they listened to their customers and gave them what they wanted."

Posted 2 years ago #