
How to Kill a Great Idea - faramarz
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea_Printer_Friendly.html
======
hristov
This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the
demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some
people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster
failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not
load at all and it was too easy to spam.

So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the
spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open
each message and discover it is spam.

The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does
not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.

~~~
leftnode
That's a great take-away I think. I think that is one of the reasons Facebook
was so successful. I've been a member of Facebook since 2004 and I can't
remember a single piece of spam I've ever seen through it.

In 2004 when I joined, it was a pretty simple, no-AJAX standard PHP site and
worked very quickly. From there, it just took off and they were able to hire
some of the best engineers and server architecture people out there.

~~~
nfriedly
I've gotten 5-10 pieces of spam through facebook in the last year or two, but
it's all been from non-techie friends who had their account phished. So at
least I was able to help them clean it up and (hopefully) learn how to avoid
it in the future.

------
albertsun
My favorite bit of the article.

 _[Abrams] was particularly vexed by the company's apparent obsession with
partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with
AOL," he recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never
got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his chairmanship._

~~~
staunch
Straight out of the The Business Man handbook. What does running a company
mean? It means doing Business Deals with other Business Men. The rest of the
time you need to sign Business Papers in your Business Chair while making
Business Calls.

<grumble>

------
mixmax
That was an amazing read. And it shows that the winners get to write the
history books.

------
gridspy
I think this is a great warning for those who think that VC funding
immediately equals success. Eating your ramen noodles for a while gives you
time to get good foundations in place before things start moving too fast.

It made me feel much better about bootstrapping Gridspy

------
vl
_Friendster, the first online social network_

Factually inaccurate? Friendster was launched in 2002, LiveJournal, for
example, in 1999.

------
benwalther
Great article, and a good moral.

It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the
beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already
knew.

~~~
lincolnq
I knew almost nothing about Friendster and I found the article captivating.
Maybe you already knew the important bits?

------
jeremymims
The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for
around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.

~~~
jon_dahl
Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital
it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed?

[1] <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster>

~~~
jeremymims
I seem to remember there were a number of news articles reporting the $100
million figure. I'm not privy to any inside information on this so I don't
really know the answer. Tech Crunch is probably the most reliable for this
kind of information.

A few of the $100 million articles:

[http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-
bought-1...](http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-
bought-100m-deal/)

[http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-
caution...](http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-cautionary-
tale-ends-in-100-million-sale/)

[http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unk...](http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unknown-
asian-group-buy-friendster-100-million/)

[http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friends...](http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friendster-
on-the-verge-of-100-million-buyout)

------
necrecious
The print friendly version is hard to read due to unbroken lines. The normal
version has too many pages splits.

Does anyone know a good javascript commandlet that will apply good style to
plain text?

~~~
ashot
<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

------
faramarz
In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the
companies growth explaining what Friendster is.

<http://bit.ly/9EAhU9>

~~~
staunch
<http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229>

FYI: URL shorteners are neither required nor preferred on HN.

~~~
faramarz
gotcha. thanks

------
fh
Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most
generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.

~~~
kgrin
Friendster launched circa 2002; I don't have the etymology of "Web 2.0"
committed to memory, but it's safe to say the silly naming really kicked in
much later.

~~~
jfarmer
If anything, "Friendster" is what started that trend.

~~~
paul9290
Ever heard of Napster?

~~~
stretchwithme
he he. good one, paulster

------
uriel
> _Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to
> make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's
> leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a
> different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi
> (NYSE:HIT) storage area network, effectively halting business development
> for six months._

Anyone knows the technical details? What was Friendster originally written in,
and in what did they rewrite it?

~~~
wayne
Java to PHP: <http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/>

------
python123
Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for
the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is
beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by
people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old
will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not
determine the trends. Facebook got it right from the start by restricting it
to colleges. I'm sure people wanted to open it up sooner, but the talented
young leaders of Facebook knew that the next big thing would be determined by
how young people choose to adopt it. Old people would follow like cattle later
on, which they did. Facebook even made sure to hire young talent at the start
because any bad hire would hurt the company when it was small. If you haven't
made something of yourself by 30, don't think you're gonna quit your job as a
career software engineer and come up with the next big thing. If you wanna do
a start-up, you're only chance is to create a lifestyle business or maybe have
a mild exit, which is still pretty good.

~~~
spokey
Spoken with the false confidence of youth.

Here's a few examples of fairly revolutionary achievements post-30, even
within the relatively narrow field of tech startups:

* Jimmy Wales was 36 when Wikipedia was founded. Larry Sanger was 34.

* Steve Jobs was 30 when he founded NeXT, 31 when he took over Pixar, 40 when Toy Story, their first major film was released, and 42 when he returned to Apple and led them to a major market turnaround, OS X, the iPod/iTunes, the iPhone/AppStore, etc.

* Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon, 37 before it turned a profit.

* John McCarthy was 31 when he first designed LISP.

* Marc Benioff was 35 when he co-founded Salesforce.com (I don't know how old his cofounders were.)

* David Winer was 33 when he founded UserLand, 41 before they started offering web publishing software.

* Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded Oracle, 35 when they made their first sale, 40 when Oracle became an ACID-database.

* PG was 40 when YCombinator first launched.

That's just off the top of my head (I had to look up the dates) and I don't
particularly pay attention to the age of tech company founders. I'm sure there
are dozens of better examples.

For a more comprehensive survey, see
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263>

I actually kinda hope you're trolling with this comment, you're way off base.

~~~
python123
Why don't you actually read my comment? I said that old people with no
achievements aren't going to suddenly become great entrepreneurs.

Jimmy Wales - extremely successful options and futures trader

Steve Jobs - I forget what company he was involved with before NeXT, but I
think it was pretty big

Jeff Bezos - one of the top people at D.E. Shaw, right under Shaw himself

John McCarthy - programming languages don't really count as entrepreneurship,
but I'm sure you could find many examples of old people creating languages

Marc Benioff - youngest VP in Oracle history

David Winer - I really have no idea what UserLand is

Larry Ellison - ok, fine. I guess if you're trying to make Oracle, it's ok to
be old. I don't mean that as a slight to Oracle, but I don't think Oracle's
story applies to web startups.

PG - I didn't say anything about old people not being able to become investors

~~~
spokey
Now I know you're trolling. Good day.

~~~
python123
How on Earth is that trolling? I completely refuted your argument, and you
can't respond so you call it trolling. None of those people were 30-year-old
career software engineers who had achieved nothing and dreamed of
entrepreneurship. They were all already successful.

And I know Hacker News is mostly that type of person, but you people need a
reality check. You can downvote all you want, but it won't change anything. I
bet you really wish it could because forums like this are probably all you
have left. You're going to wake up tomorrow and do what you're doing. I'm
going to wake up tomorrow and do what you dream of doing.

------
DotSauce
Here's a thought. Friendster failed in part because he got the name wrong. And
his new business, Socializr - much worse.

Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of his story.

