"While Friendster is reemerging as a dominant force overseas in the field of social networking, time wasn’t long ago when the once-mighty company was on its last legs. A New York Times article wonders “what happened to Friendster?” and chastises it for passing up “a billion dollar opportunity” during the height of its success. Many have privately speculated that there was no one thing Friendster did wrong. Rather, they believe, people just use whatever site their friends use, which, eventually, became MySpace and Facebook instead. Regardless, Friendster boasts one of the more high-profile “fall from grace” stories in recent years."
That's kind of wrong. All my friends in the east coast were in friendster first, but the site became so slow and painful to navigate or do anything that even something like myspace was such a refresh.
The other blunder that Friendster did at the time, was to allow people see who visited your profile. I bet their pageviews dropped overnight.
I think this is a classical case of bad execution ruining a startup.
It's simple user psychology. So much of traffic on social networking sites is lurking around on other people's pages, especially those that you're 'interested' in. I'd rather not let other people know that I've been looking at their page, especially when I've been looking at their page a lot. If I know that they know, it dis-incentivizes me from surfing around at all, killing page views.
In other words, social networks need to do everything they can to nurture their creepers.
FaceBook had a huge blunder a couple months ago when it seemed like typing a space in the search field apparently autocompleted the people who most recently looked at your profile page. It was never confirmed that that was what was happening, but people were massively creeped out and they fixed the bug within a day.
Sadly, this was mostly link bait. The first couple are certainly the biggest flops that everyone already knows about. Then the last 10 or so the author is reaching. Kiko for instance. Didn't they only raise a hundred grand or so and sell themselves on eBay for 250k? Maybe not a big success, but I wouldn't put it in the same grouping with these other startups.
The funny thing is, that the first 10 or so I could have sworn I've seen in another list elsewhere, almost word for word ... I'll have to try and dig it up.
Is Kiko really a miserable bomb? It sounds like it was a pretty cheap flyer on the online calendar market -- there was almost certainly a greater than 10% chance that they could have been bought for at least ten times what they burned through.
This is both a tear jerking article and a realization to startups everywhere.
Your idea seems good... initially... with no answer to the chicken and the egg problem... how do you become a dominate entity...
I'm only 23 and yet I vividly remember over half of these startups. Granted the majority of these started and ended during the dot com boom / collapse, these are still and will always be a realization to internet specific companies. No user base means no revenue.
Many questions arise; do you need to sell if you have a dominate opponent offering a lucrative opportunity (Alta-Vista <- Google) or do you wait it out (Facebook -> Google) and postulate an opportunity greater than your biggest competitor believes can or more importantly will see for the fate of your company.
Friendster is a company much like Facebook with many unique niches to offer. Why did they fail? Did they not see that bigger picture; did they not have a good board of directors; did they not have a robust infrastructure?
If you had a bulletproof startup that had every corner covered, had an outstanding leadership team with a concise business model and looked at each niche and improved it; is that the recipe for success or does that give them a 50/50 chance for success?
I think:
Friendster, Ning and sites similar offer a unique niche.
Facebook, MySpace and sites similar are the sites above combined.
What if you were the site that combines the unique niche of the most popular sites like Facebook and MySpace? What if you had a dominate leadership team that had a robust product which offered the most popular services combined and improved on those ideas. How does that separate FedEx from the USPS? If a company has a lucid vision for their product, how do you separate that from the already existing ideas... after all... every new idea is generated from an existing problem? How do you separate a new idea from a solution to an existing dilemma... how do you separate a better solution from an existing one? Is the quality of that solution directly pending the ease of use to the end - user or is it determined by the freedom, creativity, ingenuity, funding and end - user registration numbers?
I think the ultimate success of any company: good, bad and mediocre is based on the personal beliefs of the initiator of the product and their 'support team' (startup partners). If they ALL firmly believe in the success of their product with absolutely no doubt then they have the material, answer and solution to solve the loop - hole that garnishes users and divides the user base among other entities that offer similar services.
Sorry dude, but you must not remember them vividly, because the majority of these sites did actually have a user base and did actually make revenue. In some cases (WebVan for instance), they actually made quite a bit of revenue.
They were simply prey to illogical economics. They had all created machines that were too large for the revenues to support.
As for Friendster, I know it's been fun to say that they've failed for the last 3 years, but as far as I can tell their story isn't even close to being over. They have billions of pageviews and a growing userbase. I'm guessing you'd probably switch places with them right now.
WebVan... not a memorable company... Lycos, Alta-Vista (the original search engine), pets.com, over half of those companies had a good idea...
Friendster, 'billions' of page-views... per month?
I think I'm missing 1% of what your saying... I wouldn't switch places with them, I'm not where they are yet... I'm in the development stage, alpha-stage.
Above all that, these companies are on multiple sites listed multiple times for being 'part of the economic dot com failure'. Is that what your referring too when you say "created machines that were too large for the revenues to support"?
WebVan, for example, bought a fleet of Mercs to deliver groceries with. If they'd gone for Fords, they might have survived. OK, not that alone, but they basically spent too much money on things that customers didn't care about and wouldn't pay for.
I'm not sure how Kiko compared to the first 5~10 big failures that burnt 100mil + dollars.
Kiko is a well-justified experiment on couple hundred grands.
Anyone could re-create that business TODAY and make a profit. The market probably isn't big enough to make a living only selling life jackets, but how is that relevant?
On the other hand, Roger Ehrenberg's analysis of the Monitor110 demise is a fantastic post.
How would one earn "beenz" and "flooz"? If you didn't have to invest real money in order to earn them, I don't see why any retailer would want to accept those as an alternative currency.
Linkbait or not, it's a reminder to mind our knitting -- that is, do the things that make financial sense. Run the business from the customer up, not from the top-down.
That's kind of wrong. All my friends in the east coast were in friendster first, but the site became so slow and painful to navigate or do anything that even something like myspace was such a refresh.
The other blunder that Friendster did at the time, was to allow people see who visited your profile. I bet their pageviews dropped overnight.
I think this is a classical case of bad execution ruining a startup.