The rise and fall of Friendster

A really interesting article on the rise and fall of Friendster.

Friendster really is dead at this point, sadly. As the article repeatedly points out, the thing most directly responsible for Friendster's death was its failure to deal with technical problems. Anybody who used the site a few years ago knows that the thing just ground to a halt for a good several months. It became unusable. So people left.

What I didn't know was that part of the reason that the technical problems weren't fixed was that the idiot boards the VCs put together were too busy trying to think up grand new features and figuring out how to compete with Yahoo and Google (what???), all the while failing to pay attention to the fact that the site was, you know, dead.

To me, this is a cautionary tale about how arrogant VC can really fuck things up if you're not careful. Granted, Abrams also sounds like kind of a douche, but I think that's largely secondary here.

As an aside, I can't believe Google bought YouTube for a billion dollars. A fucking billion dollars. For a company that isn't even turning a goddamn profit. And doesn't really have a business model. And would have been sued for copyright infringment long ago if it actually had any money. You'll notice that Google has a bunch of money. I would not expect the not being sued thing to last very much longer...