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RSSI deleted my Friendster account.
May 26
Have you deleted your Friendster account too? Friendster was the first popular social networking website in the US, and the first one I ever joined, way back in 2002. Through some missteps on their part and the rise of MySpace and Facebook, they’ve completely lost any hold on America.
My Friendster account was stagnating…the only emails I would get from it were notifications of new spam messages from fictional vixens.
The Three E’s
Why wasn’t Friendster working for me? And more broadly, what makes a social networking site valuable to anyone? My view is that there are 3 behaviors that create value for members of a social network: expressing, engaging, and exploring.
- Expressing. Social networking sites provide a framework in which people can express themselves and their interests.
- Engaging. Social networking sites provide a forum for friends (and potential friends) to have rich conversations with each other.
- Exploring. Social networking sites provide a mechanism to discover new content by exploring other people in the network.
When solving a problem in a social networking context, I try to approach the solution using all three values.
Putting the end in Friendster
For me, Friendster ceased to be a place where people were expressing, exploring and engaging. The heart of any social networking site is the people who are there—and once the people leave, the party’s over.
Don’t count Friendster out though. The site is still hugely popular in other areas of the world, particularly southeast Asia.