Your Favorite Friendster Memories
Yesterday, we asked for your favorite Friendster memories now that the social network will basically be killed off at the end of May. And here they are! Harrowing, funny online tales from the turn-of-the-century.
Tell Us Your Greatest Friendster Memories
The pioneering social network Friendster is dead. The site is deleting all user content on May 31st and will reboot as an "entertainment and fun" service for Asians. In honor of its passing, want to hear your best Friendster memories.
When Facebook CEO's Was Publicly Obsessed with 'Asian Girls'
Mark Zuckerberg is startlingly young for a billionaire CEO. But he was even less mature in 2003 when, barely 19, he apparently set up a Friendster profile disclosing his taste for Asian women and dislike of books.
Friendster Re-Brands With New Video, Remains Completely Irrelevant
Hold onto your hat because Friendster is BACK, y'all! And this time, it's personal. And in their superultracool new video promoting the new ultrasuperawesome site, they somehow manage to look even more outdated.
Ben Silverman Makes His Exit
• After two very unsuccessful years as co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, Ben Silverman is finally leaving the company. He's teaming up with Barry Diller's IAC to start some sort of vague media/advertising firm. He'll be replaced by Jeff Gaspin, who headed up NBC's cable unit until now. [NYT, NYT, DF]
• Disney's G-Force
Finally, Twitter Learns When to Shut Up
The Twittersphere is up in arms over a move the message-broadcasting service made to make its site a bit less noisy: You can no longer easily eavesdrop on conversations with strangers. Hurrah!
The Billion-Dollar Blackhole of Social Media
Will anyone miss GeoCities, the antiquated homepage service Yahoo bought for $3.5 billion in 1999, and then left to rot? Venture capitalist Fred Wilson will — he hasn't seen that kind of payday in ages.
Bebo founder admits her fortune came from ripoffs
Imitation is the sincerest form of getting rich. MySpace got bought early, on the cheap; Facebook has yet to cash out. Michael and Xochi Birch's sale of Bebo, a social network more popular overseas than in the U.S., to AOL for $850 million has been the best social-network cashout to date. And how did they manage it?…
New Gawker editor's secret Web shame
Yesterday, I met Gabriel Snyder, the former
W Magazine writer who's starting as Gawker's new managing editor next week. We're coworkers, since Gawker Media publishes both Gawker and Valleywag. He seems nice enough. But one thing worries me: , which was quite in 2003. The profile, like the site itself, is seriously…
Friendster founder still pretty bitter
I like how
New York Times reporter Brad Stone ends his in today's paper — with a quote from a man who has more reason to be paranoid and jaded than most, failed Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. Abrams, who now runs a six-person startup called Socializr, says he's prepared to “hunker down if things go bad," a…
Friendster flashbacks as Facebook goes after fakesters
It seemed like only yesterday that
Jonathan Abrams was waging an all-out war against "fakesters," or on his social networking startup Friendster — because lord knows, we can't have people misrepresenting themselves on the Internet. Now it's Facebook's turn to play the heavy, . Players of the social card game were…
Worldwide visitors to Facebook up 153 percent in a year
Metrics firm ComScore reports that 132 million unique visitors logged onto Facebook in June 2008, up from just 52 million in June 2007. 117 million worldwide users visited MySpace during June 2008. Its Facebook's first definitive traffic victory, from a source advertisers actually pay attention to, over MySpace. Way…
Googler jumps ship for Faceb... erm, Friendster
Richard Kimber, managing director of Southeast Asian operations at Google, won't be moving into
the search giant's new Sydney offices. Instead, he'll — probably enticed by a healthy share of the early social network's latest $20 million in venture capital. While it remains to be seen if Kimber can help the company's…
Social network popularity just like high school
"Like the popular kids, Facebook will end up living in a trailer — just down the gravel road from Friendster." [Details] (Photo by AP/Jack Plunkett)
Bebo needs cash to keep its servers running
Now we know why Bebo's so eager for more cash. It needs more servers. According to Pingdom, Bebo has already been down for 12 hours and 28 minutes so far this year. Check out the full chart to see how 13 other social networks have fared so far.
Social nerdwanking
Coined by R. Stevens in his webcomic Diesel Sweeties, "social nerdwanking" means lording your social-network superiority over others, which is secretly the only reason you bother with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Orkut, and every other social network. Except your legitimate if fruitless use of Adult FriendFinder.
VC sponsors a social-network pissing contest
VC blogger Fred Wilson gives Google and Yahoo too much credit: He's taking their "Inbox 2.0" initiatives to turn Gmail and Yahoo Mail into social networks seriously. He 's put together a chart comparing the "social graphs" — we think he means "number of users" — of some popular social networks versus Microsoft's…
When Friendster could have bought Facebook
As a side note, a little known fact is that when I was at Friendster, I found a small company out of Harvard that we came very close to acquiring, a startup no one had heard of that time, a company named Thefacebook. I've been an admirer of Zuck and the facebook team for a long time now.
So says ex-Friendster…
Google Gang apologists demand a recount
Word is quickly spreading that Google's OpenSocial is more of a PR triumph than engineering feat. Even partners, such as Friendster, for example, want to make sure you know that they were developing their own developer platforms well before word leaked about Google's plans. On top of that, yesterday we showed you a …
Another minute, another Google Gang member
According to a source, blog-software company Six Apart has joined as another partner for Google's OpenSocial platform. For those of you keeping count at home, don't bother. The list is surely to grow as word gets out. Social network Friendster, for example, wasn't asked to join the Google Gang. The pioneering social…
