Social Networking Sites

Please go to the following web site and discuss the following: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html.

1. What was the target audience for this social networking site?
2. How long was the site in existence?
3. Why was it popular? What was its demise?
4. Is/was there another competitor in the same market that was more popular?
5. Would you ever consider creating an account and using it? Explain your reason using a personal experience as an example.

I have chosen to discuss Friendster. Friendster was created to compliment some other popular social networks as a competition with Match.com, an online dating service. Their premise was that it would be a better solution to match friends of friends rather than matching strangers. Friendster was started by Jonathan Abrams in 2002 before the creation of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. It gained popularity as a social network greatly due to being featured in several high profile print media magazines and television talk shows. Friendster was slightly before its time and suffered with technical difficulties and later with users not trusting the service. Their servers and bandwidth was not ready for the onslaught of users who were ready to take on the use of the service. A problem occurred with Fake users called Fakesters who created accounts to battle for the title of Most Popular in the network. This caused the company to form stricter rules which resulted in the loss of users.

Friendster lost ground in popularity in 2006, but moved into the limelight with an increase in membership throughout Asia and the Philippines. Services such as MySpace and Facebook seem to have replaced Friendster in the USA, but the service is still available worldwide and very popular in Asia.

I remember the start of Friendster, but cannot remember ever using it. I tend to join many new internet services, trying to use my last name as my account identity. I failed to get luffman@hotmail.com and have kicked myself ever since. I had even signed up with Hotmail before they were bought by Microsoft. Enough about Hotmail for now. Friendster's name implies being a friend or making friends online for the sake of increasing your group of friends. I have no interest in this so I would not be joining. On the other hand, I have been interested in joining new innovative technical services which had something to offer like an online identity, email storage or bookmarking services. I would never have joined FaceBook if it had not been for my son's involvement while he was in college.