Social Networkers Aren't As "Fickle" As Many Think: Friendster Doesn't Prove Anything

Please, no one write another article about how Friendster's demise can be attributed to its "fickle" user base.  This comparison is far off the mark because they mistake Friendster's underlying problems -- which were big ones -- with the behavior of the user.  The reality was that Friendster grew so fast that they were caught unprepared, and the site faltered.  This article says it all:

"During the summer of 2003, Friendster was plagued by performance issues. Often, the millions of users pounding the site were unable to access it, and when they could, results were inconsistent from page to page. User profile changes failed to show up because of lags in the distributed architecture, and messages were dropped."

Hello?  I consider it to be hardly "fickle" behavior for a user to leave a site because it simply does not work.  I recall trying to login to the site and it not loading for minutes, and I was on a broadband connection.  Simply, what made Friendster great killed Friendster.  If a social network wants to keep its users, they must firstly make sure the site performs basic functions, such as letting you login and being able to send a message to a friend with the expectation that it will show up in that other user's inbox without being drop.  Beyond that, certainly you must provide the new functionality that your user base demands, and that is exactly what MySpace has done.  They took the best of Friendster -- the networks -- and the best social activities the web has to offer -- message boards, chat, blogs, music and other goodies -- and crammed it into one site.  The result has been 2 million registered users signing up per month for the last year, culminating in Fox Interactive buying the parent company yesterday for $580 million.

Responding to Charlene Li's points that the profile is the most valuable part of the profile, I would argue that it has more to do with the percentage of your friends and the percentage of your friends of friends that are on the site.  After all, if 100% of your friends of friends are on the site, that makes it a "destination" where you can have the expectation to be able to retrieve information about 100% of your friends of friends, such as their screen names or contact information.  Absent a FOAF mechanism for exporting these relationships, it is actually more costly to change networks than changing your cell phone number: changing the network involves shifting not just your friends, but your friends of friends because your friends will not move without their friends.  Ok, I have used the word "friends" too much, but you get the idea.  My prediction is that a social network will "figure it out" and be able to establish itself as a destination with a 90%+ level of penetration of friends of friends.  As long as they can keep the servers on and be proactive about users' needs, unlike Friendster, users will not be "fickle."  My prediction is that the "fickle" attribution will naturally start to disappear over time as the survival of the top networks proves them wrong.

+++ Update: After a discussion in which my colleague Jon Turow brought up some good points, please allow me to clarify my position: while I do still think social networkers can be to some extent "fickle," I am envisioning a point when the fickleness will settle as niches and "global" network sites get entrenched.  Rather than trying to prove networkers are not fickle, I am arguing they are not as fickle as the mainstream media would have you believe.  For example, some articles you read would have you think MySpace could be a fly-by-night phenomenon, and they always reference Friendster.  My response?  I don't think so.

Comments

[alec]

I agree that Friendster has lost and Myspace has won, but I do not agree with your reasoning of why this has happened.
In fact, Friendster has about 18m users now, so probably at the very least 10m joined Friendster AFTER the scalability problems were solved by the spring of 2004. Thus these 10m users joined a normally working fast-loading site, and yet Friendster is loosing traffic to myspace.

I think the reason is that friendster lacks basic publishing features: you cannot even paste your own HTML in it, while Myspace has pages with videos, flash, and very sophisticated javascript.

[Doug Sherrets]

Alec,

Good point about Friendster's user base growth since they had scaling problems, so certainly the scaling issues did not doom it to eternal failure, but it certainly left the door wide open for a competitor like MySpace to emerge. Unfortunately for Friendster, they have been unable to adapt by adding additional features like you have listed, which is absolutely holding them back. If you have graphs showing user totals and unique visitors per month and page views across MySpace and Friendster for the last couple years, I would be most interested to see that. Surely no single explanation fits all in telling the story of why Friendster has limped along, but you will notice that MySpace has been adding 2 million users a month for quite some time now, and the more users that latch onto MySpace for its superior functionality, the less likely it becomes that Friendster will be able to reinvigorate its user base. The bottom line for me in this story is that the throw-in, obligatory "...but MySpace could easily go the way of Friendster" that appears in many mass-media stories does not really show an understanding of what happened.

Thank you for your post,
Doug

[alec]

Doug, the best I have is the public data from Alexa, comparing Friendster and Myspace:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=large&compare_sites=myspace.com&y=r&url=friendster.com

It looks like friendster's growth only stopped last Christmas, it became flat until this June and now it started its (irreversible) decline. Last Christmas is also the time when Myspace started to really grow, so it’s logical to assume that part of the users simply migrated to myspace, not that they do not need a social networking site. I think Friendster will either close eventually, or will be sold for $10-$15m, approximately the money that has been invested into it.

The operational reason for this is that it got overfunded. It’s founder Jonathan Abrams encountered higher growth than he could handle, and successfully raised an amount of money that turned out to be to large. He lost control to investors and got pushed out from the company. The VCs hired a CEO to run it. The problem is that the hired CEOs cannot innovate: they can only continue doing what the company did before. They are unimaginative people: otherwise they’d be founders themselves, which is financially a much more lucrative position. So from the time that Jonathan was fired, the company continued doing only one thing: improving scalability, until it was too late: Myspace rolled out all those new and exciting features. They of course started copying them, but it was too late.

The point is: never fire the founders. Or for the founders, never take too much money to loose control. Note that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Paypal and even eBay all have KEPT their founders until they have built a successful and profitable business, after which it can just run itself- then even a Meg Whitman can run it ;-)

[Doug Sherrets]

Alec,

Thank you for your response. Your points definitely sound reasonable. Given what you are saying as true, including that continued innovation was very important for Friendster to maintain its leadership position, do you think that social network users are fickle, or do you think that Friendster simply underserved those users to such an extent that MySpace's adding of features like blogs, video and music into one social network was such a fundamental requirement of users that a temporary low threshold for fickleness existed in the marketplace? That is, now that MySpace has innovated significantly more than Friendster, do you see the fickleness of users declining significantly because their needs (at least some of them) are being met? I am curious how you see the space evolving, especially with consideration for what my colleague Jon posted today. That is, was MySpace's victory comparatively much easier to achieve than it will be for the next social network to overtake MySpace? Will we see more specialization to the extent that social networks will become a engine of the service, but not the driver of the value? For example, Doostang is essentially a job listings site that happens to be a social network. Of course the idea with Doostang is that there is trust involved in those social network connections, so the social network engine is definitely necessary, but bottom line is that I see Doostang as a step in the direction towards social networks that are not social networks: that is, services that happen to also be social networks.

Thanks! :)
Doug

[alec]

I think social networking is a distribution mechanism, or even a feature. But the thing that gets distributed via the social networking mechanism is the core value of the service. Myspace is a self-publishing platform, like GeoCities.
Apart from better publishing tools, what really differentiates it from geocities is it's viral distribution mechanism, namely, the social networking features. But the core value is in the publishing tool- and yes, people will stick with this self-publishing tool as long as it's good enough. Friendster's self publishing tool just sucked, and the original vision of the founder to make a dating site with social network being the viral distribution mechanism was shrugged by the gready and stupid investors, who wanted more, but got zero.

[Doug Mehus]

hi Doug,

First off, thank you for your comment on my blog post and I appreciate the link. I'm not sure how I missed your comment originally, but nonetheless, I'm now getting around to properly thanking you on your own blog. Your commentary was truly appreciated.

If I may be able to bug you briefly, would be so kind as to edit this post to update the link to my post on my new blog (http://dmehus.wordpress.com/), now hosted by WordPress.com? The link to the MySpace buyout on this page should now be linked to:

http://dmehus.wordpress.com/2005/07/18/myspace-goes-to-murdochs-news-corporation/

And, thanks again! :)

- Doug Mehus

P.S. Looking back, I think it was partially the technology issues on the part of Friendster (which they've now completely fixed, albeit far too late). However, MySpace continues to be plagued by frequent outages, "unexpected errors" that are "forwarded to MySpace's technical department", and scability problems. Really, what did it was fact that was MySpace was dead simple to use in terms of user interface (even though it looked like hell), had a cool name that described exactly what it was, and integrated blogging and photo and video sharing before Friendster. It could've been any social network that overtook Friendster, but MySpace got lucky. Plain and simple.