
How Amazon bought and killed PlanetAll, an early Facebook precursor - astdb
https://qz.com/1045588/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-bought-and-killed-off-the-website-poised-to-become-facebook/
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startupdiscuss
Do you know how many "early" social networking platforms there were?
Friendster and Orkut were just two of dozens. Not sure why the one Amazon
bought would be better off than the one Google bought.

The question should be why is Facebook the one to make it big.

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scarface74
From everything I heard about Friendster, the idea was great but their
technical architecture couldn't scale. Amazon wouldn't have had that issue.

Most of what I know about Friendster comes from listening to the Startup
podcast.

[https://gimletmedia.com/episode/friendster-
part-1-season-5-e...](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/friendster-
part-1-season-5-episode-2/)

~~~
stickfigure
The problem with Friendster is that _one feature_ wouldn't scale, and it's not
obvious that Amazon would have been able to scale it either. Some problems
don't scale in linear.

The founder of Friendster believed that the "degrees of bacon" chain was a
critical feature. That chain is incredibly expensive to calculate for very
large graphs, and produced multi-second page loads. In retrospect, the obvious
answer is "drop that feature"; Facebook does fine without it. But Friendster
product management thought it was the secret sauce... and maybe it was a
reasonable thing to think back in 2002? Dunno, but it sank the company.

Most of what I know about Friendster comes from their #3 and #6 employees
(friends).

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skinnymuch
How did those early employees make out financially? If it's personal, no
problem, no need to answer. Always interesting to know how early employees end
up doing from a specific startup or overall.

~~~
stickfigure
Financially, they ended up with nothing but their paychecks.

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skinnymuch
I thought the site made an error with FB's market cap being $435B in the
article. Didn't realize FB is up close to 15% since June and closing in on
$500B now.

Interesting that this site had a lot of basic common social networking
features so early on. The 90s.

I came into it assuming something like LiveJournal or Xanga.

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paulsutter
"If [PlanetAll] were the inventors of Facebook, they'd have invented
Facebook."

