How friendster lost its opportunities
Technology developing very fast, and all the industries competing with each other every day. This is the situation now. The fail of friendster in US was not by chance; it was inevitable. Friendster lost its competitive power and market in US and only has market in Asia now. We all know that Friendster has a good start and it is the beginner of social network website industry. What opportunities does Friendster has at the beginning?
· Customize
· Technology developing
· Product flexibility
· User spread
· Google’s buy purchase
These are the main opportunities that Friendster supposed to have when it started. As the first social network website, Friendster could design to be more customize to let the users feel fun about the website. It should kept developing its technology to help customers feel more convenience when they were online. Never miss the importance of spreading information. As a social network website, the most important point for Friendster was to get more and more users and let them active, then the users would introduced the website to their friends.
However,this is how friendster looks like now, it is totally different and it is no longer a social network website now. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006.(THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES)
All the opportunities that Friendster should had become to its threat. Friendster was customized but it became to a problem—customer misuse. Users not just created their own pages but also for their pets, which messed up the website. Deal with the same situation,facebook allowed third party apps alike catbook and dogbook to help their customers more convenience to create pages for their pets. .
The technology became friendster’s weakness, in two years, Friendster could not wide its thinking and did not develop any useful and convenient technology such as the “group” section that we all know facebook has it today. In 2003, Google planed to buy Friendster and developed some new strategies, but Friendster did not catch that chance.
By 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.(THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES). You can see the following out of Friendster in this diagram:
All the opportunities that Friendster supposed to have become to its threats and weakness, and at the end lead it to die.
All the opportunities that Friendster should had become to its threat. Friendster was customized but it became to a problem—customer misuse. Users not just created their own pages but also for their pets, which messed up the website. Deal with the same situation,facebook allowed third party apps alike catbook and dogbook to help their customers more convenience to create pages for their pets. .
The technology became friendster’s weakness, in two years, Friendster could not wide its thinking and did not develop any useful and convenient technology such as the “group” section that we all know facebook has it today. In 2003, Google planed to buy Friendster and developed some new strategies, but Friendster did not catch that chance.
By 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.(THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES). You can see the following out of Friendster in this diagram:
All the opportunities that Friendster supposed to have become to its threats and weakness, and at the end lead it to die.
References:
ROBERT MCMILLAN BUSINESS 02.27.13 THE FRIENDSTER AUTOPSY: HOW A SOCIAL NETWORK DIES
http://www.friendster.com
FEATURING MIKE FISHER, AUGUST 1,2013
Ain't Misbehavin: How Encouraging Product "Misuse" Helped Facebook Beat Friendster
