According to Wired, despite having millions of users, many users weren't connected to others. By 2009, Malaysia-based FinTech company MOL Global acquired Friendster for a total of $26.5 million, sold all of its registered patents to Facebook for $40 million, and, in 2011, deleted all of its user’s data to relaunch as a gaming site. Venture capitalists considered shutting it down, and Viacom was offered the chance to acquire Friendster for $5 million, but private investors invested $3 million into the company instead.įriendster was able to regain trust and fix most of the issues slowing down the site by 2007. By 2006, Friendster was almost out of money and had halved its payroll to 25 employees.
Between 20, Friendster turned over five CEOs. On top of that, Abrams was known to be out partying rather than focusing on fixing Friendster.
Unfortunately, adding these new features to Friendster would only further slow down the site. Meanwhile, other social networking sites, like Myspace, were adding user-demanded features such as blogs and other tools to augment their profiles. Things would become so bad that a Friendster web page took as long as 40 seconds to download." Kent Lindstrom, an early investor and one of the first employees at Friendster, claimed that rather than focus on the technical or performance problems, the board talked about competitors and adding new, unnecessary features, like Internet phone services and VoIP (voice over Internet protocol).Īdditionally, there wasn't much to do on Friendster after you created your profile and social network. According to the New York Times, "As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed web site became slower. However, Friendster's success also led to challenges. In 2003, Google offered $30 million to purchase Friendster, but Abrams declined. Founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams was even invited onto Jimmy Kimmel Live. It gained 3 million users in its first few months and received a lot of media attention, including coverage from Time Magazine, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Entertainment Weekly. What Happened: Friendster was a social networking site founded in 2002, predating both MySpace and Facebook.
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