Before Facebook was a giant, there was Friendster.

We are now living the Facebook era. With more than 300 million users Facebook is the king today, just like MySpace was the king of its days. Now have you ever heard about Friendster? Before there was Facebook and MySpace there was Friendster. Once the next big thing, Friendster was the first online social network and was destine to be a superstar, a pioneer of the now hot trend that is called social network, the company failed miserably even backed by investors. But why? Jonathan Abrams the founder of Friendster was all over the media back in 2003. You could see him with Jimmy Kimmel and with Charlie Rose, you would turn to financial networks and you would see him and you could not get enough of the guy, but everything came tumbling down pretty quick and today he is the butt of jokes, being bad mouthed by former investors, the news media and bloggers alike. Friendster did one crucial mistake: it tried to grow too fast and too quick. VC's backing the company brought Professionals from all over the spectrum, unfortunately the idea of bringing experienced big shots backfired. Each of the new members of the board and directors had strong ideas for the business often clashing and not worrying about its user. Also as it grew, the site started to have a lot of problems and before trying to fix its bugs that were increasing as the numbers of users increased, the site went onto a partnership spree, resulting in a poorly integrated features such as: blogs with (six apart), video sharing with (Grouper), personalized searches with (Eurekter) VoIP with (Glophone) and Internet Radion with (Pandora). All of that partnering and lack of attention to its software code meant poor quality of their site and long clocking turning users away to more friendly rivals such as MySpace. By the end of 2004 while MySpace had 22 Million users, Friendster only had 1.1 Million. The lack of knowledge of its leadership team along their failed vision of the change in social networking landscape meant the death of Friendster. Today Friendster is studied at Harvard Business School as an example in what not do in Business.

About the Author

Timothy Gates has been writing articles for the past 2 years. Please visit his new site http://www.massachusetts-granite.com/ for information on discount granite countertops.