Friendster

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Friendster
motto "Connecting Smiles"
description social network
owner MOL Global
Originator Jonathan Abrams
Published March 22, 2002
status shut down on June 14, 2015

Friendster was a web-based social network founded in 2002 and operated by Friendster Inc., which was particularly popular in the English-speaking and Asian regions . The site was the largest social network on the Internet until April 2004, but was then overtaken by Myspace , which was also founded in 2002, based on the number of page views.

In October 2003, a $ 53 million financing round was carried out by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital . That same year, a previous $ 30 million purchase offer from Google was rejected. Another round of financing followed in 2005 by Kleiner and Benchmark Capital, with the overall value of Friendster being downgraded significantly.

In 2006 Friendster was granted a patent applied for in 2003 for the calculation and display of friendship relationships in social networks, which led to speculation in the press that Friendster might specialize in the licensing of this patent in the future.

In 2009 Friendster was taken over by the Malaysian online payments group MOL Global. The purchase price was not officially stated, but the British Financial Times reported that the sum was probably no more than 100 million dollars.

As of June 28, 2011, all photos, videos, blogs and comments were deleted as part of a change after prior notice. Friendster was continued as a social gaming platform in order to no longer compete with Facebook, but to complement it. For example, users could log into Friendster via the Facebook Connect interface using their Facebook user account. With the relaunch, business operations were relocated from the USA to Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. The target group were young Asian gamers worldwide.

The collapse of Friendster as a social network was noted in 2013 by Garcia et al. at Cornell University using huge datasets. The decline in users from 58 million in July 2009 to just 10 million a year later became particularly clear. It shows that above all well-networked users with 67 or more connections with one another remained. Garcia suspected that changes in the user interface and some technical errors in early 2009 were the trigger for the sharp decline. In 2016, a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research on social networks identified a kind of limit of what is reasonable from the perspective of complex systems. This limit is 40 percent: if 40 percent of friends leave the social network, users will find this loss no longer acceptable.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nielsen NetRatings
  2. ↑ TechCrunch: Friendster recapitalized
  3. ↑ CNN Money Blog: Friendster wins patent
  4. ^ BusinessWeek: Friendster's Patent Possibilities
  5. ↑ Patent US7069308 B2 on Google Patents
  6. ↑ Golem.de: MOL Global buys the social network Friendster
  7. ↑ Jimmy Hitipeuw: New Friendster Site Gaining Momentum. In: KOMPAS.com. September 14, 2011, accessed October 4, 2019 .
  8. ^ David Garcia, Pavlin Mavrodiev, Frank Schweitzer: Social Resilience in Online Communities: The Autopsy of Friendster . In: Cornell University (Ed.): Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks COSN '13 . Ithaca February 25, 2013, p. 39-50 .
  9. ↑ Yi Yu, Gaoxi Xiao, Jie Zhou, Yubo Wang, Zhen Wang: System crash as dynamics of complex networks . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . tape 113 , no. 42 , October 18, 2016, ISSN  0027-8424 , p. 11726–11731 , doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1612094113 , PMID 27698137 ( pnas.org [accessed October 4, 2019]).
  10. ^ Niels Boeing: Social networks: "Facebook could become a non-profit organization" . In: The time . March 10, 2019, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed October 4, 2019]).