Who is the ceo of friendster

Discovering new events, brands and hobbies became so easy. The app was also used for finding dates. It was an original social networking platform. In , the company became a social gaming and entertainment site after it was sold out.

Further in the article, we will explain why such an early start and a great product had to shift from their initial Business model and become a gaming site. The company ceased its functions in July after they failed to gain momentum in the gaming network also. Like any other social networking or non-subscription sites, Friendster would sell advertisements to companies who want to reach users. Initially, this was the main source of income.

Their sites had a massive user base and companies would provide huge sums of money to display advertisements. They had content partners which included game developers and publishers providing the company with monetization solutions.

Company also provided software developers access to APIs that utilized data within the Friendster network. Friendster was successful in coming up with revolutionary products and also had sufficient fundings to have a big start. The site shut down its social media networking services on June 14, , and sold off to become a gaming site. Key areas in which the company lagged were Technology, user-experience and platform. Bringing the site into the world is not enough, you need to continuously work on it to make it better.

This slowness in logging in, loading of contents, and even total site shutdowns created a lot of frustration among users. Bad technology breeds bad user experience. As the competitors grew, users lost interest and found more fun features elsewhere. Soon Facebook emerged and grew at a fast pace. Their product had everything that Friendster lagged like photos, sharing, app content, games, and privacy whatnot.

Facebook picked up upon shortcomings of Friendster and worked them out smoothly. Moreover bringing in dating features in networking by Friendster was not a good step, it only invited fake profiles to the sites.

The idea totally backfired. It lost out to its competitors besides starting first. But after its early success, it quickly began to decline. And this gradual decline inevitably became the reason for its fall. By , Friendster had lost most of its popularity in the US and most of its user were from Southeast Asia. Most of the users were only friends with their immediate relatives and friends or in other words Friendster lost in keeping up with its major objective that was making people meet new people.

The services of Friendster and its website was closed in In , Friendster was launched with the main purpose that everyone from around the world over 16 can interact and socialize with their old friends and also make new ones. And judging from its initial performance, it can easily be considered as a hit. Even after fading away from countries like the USA, it was still getting a large amount of traffic from countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and other South Eastern Asia countries.

The recent research has shown that Friendster was still getting a huge amount of traffic from these countries up until And even after its transformation from social networking site to a social gaming site, the main source of their website traffic were the same countries from South East Asia. One thing Friendster still had despite being overshadowed by websites like Facebook and twitter was the large sum of members Friendster still had. In , Friendster granted the portfolios of its patents to the social networking companies.

Facebook was the most active one as it acquired more than 18 of Friendster patents. From its inception in to its eventual sale in late , Friendster would experience changes in its C-suite. In fact, the company had a total of six different CEOs over that very same time span. Each and every one of those CEOs brought with him a unique leadership style and vision for the company, which made it tough to plan for the long-term. It comes as no surprise that Facebook, which eventually outperformed all the other social networks that came before it, had the very same CEO since its inception.

Unfortunately, founder and first-time CEO Abrams seemed not capable to meet the various challenges that the company had faced. Last but not least, another major factor why Friendster failed was the extensive content moderation enforced by the platform.

Friendster was frequently banning users whenever they stepped out of line. Many of these users ended up migrating over to Myspace, which was much more lenient with its content moderation efforts. Danah Boyd, a U. Berkeley Ph. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favorite band is playing. The platform famously removed the profiles of users who put up joke pictures, like photographs of their dogs in place of themselves.

Hi folks, my name is Viktor! By day, I lead a tech team of 10 for an e-commerce startup. At night, I work on expressing my weird thoughts through this blog. And if there's time, I cuddle my cat.. The site arose from my fascination with how modern-day businesses utilize technology and product-led thinking to become dominant players in their industry.

Email Quora Get paid to write! Buy me a coffee. Executive Summary: Friendster was a social networking service that allowed you to set up user profiles, connect with other people, and communicate with them. Wayback Machine. Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in Although Winner claims the rewrite was successful, load times continued to be a problem as late as , according to Chander Sarna, Friendster's current vice president of engineering.

Whether or not it was a success, Winner's program was divisive. Many of the software developers considered the rewrite unnecessary, while the product development team complained that they needed to add features to the site in order to compete with MySpace. The result was constant bickering between cliques and side projects that went nowhere. Sassa, a Hollywood deal maker who had never closely managed engineers, lacked the technical expertise to moderate those disputes.

At the board level, Siegelman says, there was a realization that the management team was "dysfunctional," but the board was loath to micromanage. M eanwhile, scant attention was paid to Friendster's users. Lunt remembers marveling sometime in early at how Friendster's traffic would mysteriously spike at 2 a. Intrigued, he started looking at the site's log.

Oh, my God, he thought, everyone is from the Philippines. He worked backwards, looking for "patient zero"--the first American to "Friendster" a Filipino. He found Carmen Leilani De Jesus, a year-old marketing consultant and part-time hypnotherapist from San Francisco, the 91st person to join Friendster. She was directly connected to Abrams as well as to dozens of Filipinos, who'd in turn connected to thousands more.

In fact, more than half the site's traffic was coming from Southeast Asia. From a business standpoint, the revelation was devastating. Friendster, it turned out, was paying millions of dollars a year to attract eyeballs that were effectively worthless to its advertisers. Says Abrams: "We needed to make a tough decision"--either spin off the Asian business or become the No. But because the Filipino users had come by way of their American friends, there was no easy answer.

If Friendster cut the cord to Asia--either by drastically cutting back on engineering resources or by kicking the Asian users off the site altogether--it risked damaging its American user base. The Carmens of the world might look for a less restrictive site. Of course, that's what happened anyway. Unbeknownst to Abrams, Sassa, and Friendster's investors, demand for social networking was changing. The lure of Friendster--and, to a much greater extent, MySpace--was not the elegant web of connections but rather the opportunity to gawk at strangers.

Rather than using Friendster to make dates, most of its users were simply cruising around and looking at the weird interests, pictures, and blog-droppings of strangers including so-called "fakester" profiles of Jesus and Burt Reynolds. Real-life connections, the core of Abrams's vision, were not quite as relevant as he'd imagined. Thus, the free-spirited MySpace, which allowed anyone to look at anyone else's profile and didn't bother to calculate connections, took off.

The site surpassed Friendster by the end of after only a year in business. A mere nine months later, it would be clocking 22 million unique users per month in the U. As MySpace pulled away, morale at Friendster plummeted.

This was especially true among the engineering ranks--normally the workaholics in any tech start-up. That summer, with four months of operating capital left in the bank, Sassa resigned. Kleiner Perkins promptly hired him as "CEO in residence," a position he would hold for just under a year. With the understanding that the VCs would inject more money into the company, Kwon agreed to become Friendster's fourth CEO in two years. When Abrams was told of the hiring at a board meeting, he was irate.

Several weeks later, he met Kwon for dinner at a South Bay restaurant. As they ate, Kwon grilled Abrams about missed opportunities: Why hadn't Friendster incorporated music or videos? What about a functionality that would allow users, and even companies, to invite people to parties?

They were all suggestions, he says, he'd been making for years. For his part, Kwon was heartened by the conversation, hoping that he'd have more success wrangling the board and controlling the engineers. The optimism did not last long. Shortly after the dinner, Kleiner's John Doerr called to inform Kwon that he was resigning from the board.

A new round of VC funding was not discussed. By February , Kwon had resigned and Siegelman had declined to participate in Kleiner's next fund. Abrams was off the board, and Friendster was on the auction block. No serious bids were made. Following the dinner with Kwon, Abrams disappeared from a public life that had been packed with speaking engagements, television appearances, and magazine photo shoots with beautiful women. He traded those for the solitude of programming, spending 12 hours a day attempting to build a new company out of the event functionality he'd wanted to include in Friendster.