Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again It's been more than a decade since social media platform Friendster went dark, but a new owner has brought it back from the dead - sort of - with the hope he can give exhausted users of modern platforms a reprieve. Philadelphia-based computer programmer Mike Carson said in a blog post on Monday that he bought the Friendster …
What's the catch here? Why shouldn't we believe success invites enshittification, whether that was the plan from the beginning, or a founder just happened to fall in love with that ring they were given?
Also, it should be noted this requires installing (cr)apps. Connecting to the (cr)app stores invites advertising, exfiltrates data, and undermines privacy, even if a specific package doesn't.
I too wonder what the catch might be. What's his profit here? He doesn't sound like a rich philanthropic idealist who decided to improve his karma. Probably he will resell it as soon as it got enough users, and users are hooked enough to stay even if it starts having ads and all the usual stuff.
Sounds definitely too good to be true.
Sorry, too old for blind optimism: It has been beaten out of me.
If he can avoid the pit falls of greed and keep it honest he will probably be very, very successful. He has to make it work FOR us, and not AGAINST us. The problem is that the same people who will make you money fast, will be screaming and shouting at him to do things that will destroy it. He has to avoid THAT. That's not easy. Keep it honest. Realize that bots and foreign actors, as well as overly paid young "influencers" and advertisers, will be all over this. Those are NOT his targets. He has to keep this app friendly to the average user. Make it about the ACTUAL user.
More than likely, as soon as he has sufficient amounts of people interested and signed up, he will sell everyone off to the baddies.
If he manages to keep the promise that you have to meet people you connect to in reality, it does not fix the problems 100%, but it goes a long way towards it. The beautiful Russian influencer is not going to meet me in person – and if she does, it will be a GRU ogre delivering a dose of polonium, so an app will be the least of my problems.
I'm a bit dubious of his intentions. His primary source of revenue sounds like domain name reselling. And using parked domains to throw ads up to people who typo or use a domain that went out of biz and picked it up on the cheap. Both fall on the scam side of my scales.
I was briefly on Myspace. Only created an account because of keeping in touch with some friends I made in an online game. Some people's pages were absolute abominations of images and sound - but it was quite fun doing friendly piss-taking about other peoples' taste in music. Mine is, of course, impeccable! Also pages did tend to look better than Geocities - admittedly not a high bar of achievement though.
I don't think I even know anyone who used Friendster. I'd heard of it, but not very much. I was on Facebook for a couple of years, never liked it, but family stuff. Lost access to my account through some arbitrary couple of months of not logging in and wasn't willing to give them a scan of my passport to get it back. Circles was a good UI - and the ability to split your friends into different groups was useful, but almost nobody I knew joined it - and I've never used social media for anything more than a way of looking at family photos anyway.
Happy nostalgia for the good old days. Jumpers for goal posts. Proper puddings with custard...
ClippyAI: Around 2010 .. Facebook reportedly acquired or licensed Friendster’s patents for an estimated $40 million. Key aspects of the Friendster patents: fundamental social networking, relationships within social networks", method of inducing content uploads in a social network.
Well, if you take pinboard.io the solo dude who built it started out selling lifelong subscriptions for a lot less than $1.00. The catch was that the price ramped up continuously as more users joined.
Clearly he didn’t go broke during that phase. I joined, years later, at $11.00 perma-sub. Did get an email about 4 yrs back, sob story about costs and could I “volunteer” for the current $22/yr? Ignored - I made him several referrals - and to be fair never heard back.
Simple compute is cheap. The guy who launched plentyoffish started it out as a tech stack learning project. Most folk never paid.
If he can get over the starting hump, keep costs down, not flunk his site security and “settle” for a few mil, why not? Wait and see, trust hope but verify…
I think the point here might be that the guy who bought it already has revenue, so this could lose money and he'd shrug it off.
Too many people seem to think that the end-goal of life is to accumulate as much money as possible and cling onto it; this results only in a stagnating unbalanced economy with oligarchs at the top and everyone else in poverty. It shouldn't actually be anathema to spend some of your earnings on something that isn't a money-spinner. The alternative is for very few individuals to end up with all the money, and then suddenly that money no longer has any value, and other resources take over as the currency used to build the guillotines. Examples of this playing out are copious throughout history; we're supposed to have a regulated economy to prevent this sort of thing.
1) just because you own friendster.com doesn't necessarily mean someone else doesn't own the Friendster trademark. He might get contacted by a lawyer soon if/when such owner notices someone is trying to bring it back to life.
2) requiring tapping phones to add friends is fine in theory, but that really limits your social circle. How do you connect with friends who have moved away, or just don't see that often? You might still consider them good friends, talk to them on the phone, engage with them on other social media to stay connected in each other's lives, but there would be no way to add them.
I think he'll have to compromise on the tapping phones thing. Maybe have a different category of friendship for those (give an "in person" star for people who you have tapped to verify friendship or whatever) but you gotta have a way where you could for example post on Facebook "hey I'm on friendster if you are too add me there" to build your circle. Otherwise I'd have to ask people in see in RL "are you on friendster?" and when it is getting off the ground 99% of them will say "no" or "what's friendster?" or "I don't need yet another social media account" and it just isn't going to be able to build a network. If I joined and I had only five friends on it I was able to add in person I'd never use it because it would be boring as hell and it'll never reach critical mass.
And how is he planning on keeping this going if it catches fire and there are 100 million users a year from now? You gotta get revenue somehow, unless you are independently wealthy, which I assume a "Philadelphia area programmer" is likely not. So either you bring in outside investors, who will demand some way to make a return on their investment, or you will have to find a way to make a return on it yourself.
Now in exchange for some type of enforceable ironclad guarantee that it would never have ads or 'sponsored' stuff where you see content not from your friends (or perhaps friends of friends) I would be willing to pay a buck or two a month if I became a regular user of this. Would enough others be willing to do so though? That's the only way you can make a go of it without advertising, which guarantees eventual enshittification.
“just because you own friendster.com doesn't necessarily mean someone else doesn't own the Friendster trademark”
From the article “he bought the Friendster domain and later secured the brand's trademarks last year”, which suggests he has applied a little thought to that.
I used to be on Friendster (and before that Friends Reunited) really liked them both. Didn't Friendster have some sort of degrees of separation thing so you could connect with friends of friends and so on?
Agreed re adding contacts. I only use social media for friends who I can't see in person. People I actually see, I actually talk to. Saves all that bad typing.
And how is he planning on keeping this going if it catches fire and there are 100 million users a year from now? You gotta get revenue somehow, unless you are independently wealthy, which I assume a "Philadelphia area programmer" is likely not.
From the article:
Carson has made a career out of starting solo SaaS operations, like domain name backordering site Park.io, as well as playing the domain name market, and his acquisition of Friendster happened because of his connection to that industry.
Sounds like he is doing alright for himself.
There are heaps of people doing alright for themselves, but you can count on one hand the millionaires who fancy spending big money for other people without some return (usually PR). It only happens (rarely) when they get old and start thinking about their "legacy" (see Bill Gates). But most millionaires will keep trying to make money, if only out of habit.
To put it differently, generous people never get rich. Those who do are usually strongly profit-oriented by nature.
«Carson decided to take one user's advice to make it impossible to connect with users, and thus add them to one's friend list, without physically touching phones together, à la NFC, AirDrop, etc.
"The idea that the only way to connect as friends on Friendster is by tapping phones was fun because it would promote people meeting in person," Carson said. "It would also verify that you are connecting to real people, and people that you actually want to connect with."»
This (boreal) summer I'll be in "Madriz" for the 20 year reunion of my master's Degree ¿Shall I run like crazy trying to re-add all my friends on friendster? ¿What About all the friends that could not travel there?
I have Family and friends who left Venezuela for many other places during our (ongoing) diaspora ¿Shall I globetrott to add them? I am not sure if my finances can handle that...
Such silly idea...
If, at least you have a "tiered" friend system (say, addewd the normal way, added via phone touch, the friend and I coincide if we are friends or aquantiances, etc), that would be another thing... ¿but this?... silly indeed.
I suppose every site's got to have a gimmick.
One way to improve it, might be to have friend groups. So you could be friends with someone that you've not touched phones with, but one of the people you've "phone-bonked" has. Although you probably don't want to make it 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon.
But then, I don't know how Friendster was originally used. And he's setting this site up as nostalgia for how he used it, back in the day, so may not have thought about how other people did.
The SocMed well has been so poisoned that vanishingly few will be willing to take a punt, I suspect most folk only keep an FB account for occasional messaging with their boomer relatives & the local sales pages, since feed content is totally unwatchable for any sane individual. (Kind of a shame Craiglist discussions are 'three guys and a dog' when -in many ways- it's the perfect platform). SocMed revolving around common interest (Discord/games etc) is far more relevant than maintaining a visual group network with actual meatbags you know, for the purpose of idk . . . . . boredom? Better off taking a verbal dump on 4chan.
Internet services don't run on positive vibes and utopian intentions. They will need to earn money some way to pay for infrastructure and salaries. If it's not free, the number of people who will be interested drops hugely right from the start.
And I'm still not sure how this "social network where you can't add people you aren't standing next to in meatspace" is worth anything... If I want to talk to people I already know, my phone does that without installing another app and convincing the other person(s) to also download said app: I just send them a text or call them.
Cheer up! I'm sure you can always pay people to be your friends!
There were a few micro-corps back in the days I played Eve Online (mid 2000s), which consisted of a rich Russian guy and all his corp mates who he paid to run things for him while he was at work - so he could come home and be the admiral of his very own fleet. Eve was sort-of like social networking - well anti-social networking anyway... I used to camp the pirates who camped my corp's gate back into high-sec and at least blow up their loot when I couldn't help my corp mates - I'm not sure if that makes me a big-dammed-hero or an evil griefer - guess it depends on your point of view...
@An_Old_Dog
Exactly (or in person too).
I always assumed whole point of social networking was communicating with people that had some shared interests who you were very unlikely to ever meet in IRL...Obviously that is not always the reality of social media.
I'm not much of a social media user (no surprise there) - ironically the best I tried was (now defunct) Google+. Obvious drawback that it was Google data slurpage, but had little in the way of ads, no algorithmic junk thrown at me, just content from the people I was linked with.
> "Obvious drawback that it was Google data slurpage, but had little in the way of ads, no algorithmic junk thrown at me, just content from the people I was linked with."
...yet.
It's Google policy to not enshittify a product until it has critical mass and users are locked in.
By requiring physical phone contact to register "friends", Neo-Friendster builds up a map of a person's "real" contacts, minus the noise of never-met-'em-fake-social-media-friends.
That much-smaller, much-more-accurate dataset is worth far-more money.
I don't know anything about this guy beyond what's in the article, but he seems like quite the dealmaker.
For plausible deniability, he can just sell of Neo-Friendster to SellzumCo, which in turn does the actual dirty work of revising their T&Cs page to, "All your data are belong to us," and then selling that dataset to whom/whatever will pay Sellzum's price.
I don't know about you, but I have friends and family spread far-and-wide across at least five continents. Meeting some of them in person is a once-in-a-couple-of-decades thing, given that travelling around the world is generally quite prohibitively expensive. Those who live on the other side of this country I'm likely to only see in person a couple of times a year. I'm still interested in what they are up to.
I'm assuming the tap-the-phone thing is a once-only requirement to actually add someone to your friends list, not something you'd require on each interaction, otherwise you'd just be having a good old-fashioned in-person face-to-face conversation.
The main problem this is going to have isn't the requirement to tap, it's gaining enough traction to get a critical mass of users; the same reason Bluesky hasn't replaced Twitter yet.
Bluesky can run entirely in a browser sandbox. There's no requirement to use mobile, join (cr)app stores, or let surveillance software past a phone's defenses.
These things are important for any alternative social network because the consumer robots are already on Facebook or Twitter and see no need to switch.
If the model doesn't work well entirely in-browser, then it's hard to build up enough trust for a skeptical user to give it more access than that. Not to mention all the users who don't use mobile social networking because of the tech requirements.
