Don Bosco Institute of Arts and Sciences Total Quality Management (TQM)

Pamantasan ng Cabuyao
Katapatan Subd., Brgy. Banay-banay
Cabuyao, Laguna

CASE STUDY ASSIGNMENT:

Friendster is a social gaming site that is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was previously known as a social networking
service website. Before the site was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and
share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and
hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network. It was
considered one of the original and even the "granddaddy" of social networks. The service became popular in Southeast Asia and is
a major site in that region of the world.

History

Friendster was founded by Canadian computer programmer Jonathan Abrams in 2002, before the wider adoption of MySpace
(2003), Facebook (2004) and other social networking sites. Friendster was one of the first of these sites to attain over 1 million
members, although it was preceded by several other smaller social networking sites such as Pets.com (1997).

The name Friendster is a portmanteau of "friend" and Napster. Napster at the time was a controversial peer-to-peer file sharing
Internet service that was launched in 1999; by 2000, "Napster" was practically a household word, thanks to several high-profile
lawsuits filed against it that year. The old Friendster site was founded in Mountain View, California and was privately owned.
Friendster was based on the "Circle of Friends" (social network) technique for networking individuals in virtual communities and
demonstrates the small world phenomenon. Friendster was considered the top online social network service until around April
2004 when it was overtaken by MySpace in terms of page views, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Friendster.com went live in 2002 and was adopted by three million users within the first few months. Publications including Time,
Esquire, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, US Weekly and Spin wrote about Friendster's success and the founder appeared on
magazine covers and late-night talk shows. Friendster's rapid success inspired a generation of niche social networking websites
including Dogster and Elfster.

Friendster had also received competition from all-in-one sites such as Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo! 360, and Facebook. Google
offered $30 million to buy out Friendster in 2003, but the offer was turned down. Friendster was then funded by Kleiner, Perkins,
Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital in October 2003 with a reported valuation of $53 million. Friendster's decision to stay
private instead of selling to Google in 2003 is considered one of the biggest blunders of Silicon Valley, the Associated Press
claims. In April 2004, John Abrams was removed as CEO and Tim Koogle took over as interim CEO. Koogle previously served
as President and CEO at Yahoo!. Koogle was later replaced by Scott Sassa in June 2004. Sassa left in May 2005 and was replaced
by Taek Kwon. Taek Kwon was then succeeded by Kent Lindstrom, following a recapitalization by Kleiner and Benchmark that
valued Friendster at less than one-twentieth its 2003 valuation.

As of 2008 Friendster had a membership base of more than 115 million registered users and continued to grow in Asia. According
to Alexa, the site has suffered an exponential decline in traffic in America since 2009. From a peak 40 ranking it reached 800 in
November 2010. Most people have since attributed this decline to the rise of Facebook, a rival social networking site. In August
2008, Friendster hired ex-Google executive Richard Kimber as the CEO. Kimber focused on Friendster's expansion in Asia.

On December 9, 2009, it was announced that Friendster was acquired for $26.4 million by MOL Global, one of Asia's biggest
Internet companies. MOL Global is funded by one of Malaysia's successful businessmen, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, Chairman and
Chief Executive of Berjaya Corporation Berhad.

In June 2011, the company repositioned itself into a social gaming site and discontinued user social network accounts. But
Friendster accounts will not be deleted and users can still log in using their existing e-mail login and password. They also stated
that contact list (or friendlist) will be preserved along with user's basic information. Friendster said that in the new and improved
website, the focus will be on pure "entertainment and fun", and aims not to compete with, but rather to complement Facebook.

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Financial History

The company was originally founded in 2002 with a $12 million investment by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark
Capital, and private investors.

In 2003, Friendster management received a $30 million buyout offer from Google, which they declined.

Friendster received another $3 million in funding in February 2006 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark
Capital. In August 2006, Friendster also received $10 million in funding in a round led by DAG Ventures, and Friendster
announced in August 2008 that it had raised an additional $20 million in funding in a round led by IDG Ventures.[3][30] Prior to
its acquisition by MOL Global, Friendster was backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures,
IDG Ventures, and individual investors.

Languages

Available languages include English, Filipino, Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified),
Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Until September 2007, Friendster was available only in English. Ten new languages were added
from 2007 to January 2009, with Filipino being the most recent addition. Users can also enter content on Friendster in any
language.

Friendster launched all language support on a single domain - www.friendster.com. Friendster is the first global online social
network to support Asian languages and others on a single domain so that users from around the world can talk to each other.

Site transformation

In June 2011, Friendster shifted from social networking site to a social entertainment site which focuses on gaming and
entertainment. The accounts are unchanged and still existing. However, all the photos, messages, comments, testimonials,
shoutouts, blogs, forums and groups that the users may have had in the past may no longer be part of their Friendster account. An
exporting tool is provided to back up the information of the user account. This tool has an ability to export photos to Flickr and
Multiply.

Deadline given to users to export their photos was extended to 27 June 2011. Photos which were not exported before the deadline
were removed and are no longer retrievable. In the two months after the new Friendster has relaunched, the site attracted more
than half a million new users and included over 40 games. Daily and monthly active users increased by 50 percent, with more than
90 percent of new users coming from Asia.

THE FALL

What kills a social network? A group of internet archeologists have picked over the digital bones of Friendster — the pioneering
social networking site that drowned in Facebook’s wake — and we now have a clearer picture of its epic collapse.

Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened
by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it
trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in Southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign
crushed it.

It ended up being a kind of “controlled demolition,” with weakly connected chains of friends quickly disintegrating, says David
Garcia, a professor with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the authors of a recent paper analyzing Friendster’s
demise.

Just before Friendster relaunched itself as a gaming site in 2011, the Internet Archive crawled the dead network, grabbing a
snapshot. Garcia and his fellow researchers used that snapshot of that controlled demolition as the basis for their research, which
they describe as both a work of internet archeology and an autopsy.

What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t
particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with
just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing
with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.

“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the
core users, and thus unraveling,” Garcia told us during an online chat.

You can see the hollowing out of Friendster in this diagram:

CONNECTION FAILED Image: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not
only have a lot of friends, but they have “resilience and social influence,” Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole
Friendster thing fell apart.

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If there’s a lesson to be learned from the data, it’s that it takes more than a lot of users to build a viable social network. They need
to have strong connections too. So Facebook should be looking at the types of connections it users have and encourage them to
connect to other strongly connected users, Garcia says.

In other words, strong networks are made up of strongly-linked people, not of stragglers.

How to Kill a Great Idea! BY Max Chafkin

Jonathan Abrams created the first online social network and enlisted Silicon Valley's best and brightest to run it. Yet Friendster
flamed out spectacularly. What went wrong?

IT'S MY PARTY After being forced out of Friendster, Abrams launched Slide, a stylish basement lounge in San Francisco. It's
not easy being the brains behind one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history. Sure, there are those who describe you as
a visionary, but in the same breath they'll deride you as a lousy businessman. Bloggers attack you, call you "a real asshole" and "a
very lucky idiot savant." Former investors badmouth you. Other entrepreneurs copy your ideas without giving you credit. The
New York Times makes reference to your "ballooning ego" and the local Fox affiliate can't even get your name right.

Jonathan Abrams--founder of Friendster, the first online social network, and a pioneer of one of today's hottest trends on the Web-
-tries his best not to think about these things. And with two new companies, he has plenty to distract him. Last September he
opened Slide, a stylish basement lounge in downtown San Francisco. And in March, he launched a new bid to make it big on the
Web- Socializr, a website that lets users invite people to parties and other events.

And yet the story of how Friendster, once the hottest start-up in America, became the butt of a business joke continues to
preoccupy him. And no wonder. By the rules of Silicon Valley, Friendster--a bold idea backed by experienced investors and the
best managers money could buy - was destined for greatness. Instead, it failed spectacularly. "I did what you're always told to do
as a young entrepreneur," Abrams says. "I brought on experienced investors to help Friendster fulfill its potential. But the all-star
team was the curse of death."

If he had invented something as mundane as a brilliant customer relations management application, no one would know Jonathan
Abrams's name. But as the creator of the first online social network, Abrams promised something truly exciting: to change the
way people communicated with one another. As Fortune put it in October 2003, "There may be a new kind of Internet emerging--
one more about connecting people to people than people to websites." In the months following its launch earlier that year,
Friendster garnered millions of devotees, who used its name as both a verb and a noun. By the end of 2003, the company Abrams
founded in his San Francisco apartment had raised $13 million from the same investors who'd backed Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay
and had appeared in scores of major magazines and newspapers. Friendster was a company the world could understand,
participate in, and dream on. It was the next big thing.

Friendster is among the few start-ups that changed the world--but not as its founder had hoped. During March 2007, one out of
every five Americans visited MySpace.com, a copycat site that was built in 2003 by Intermix and sold to News Corp. two years
later for half a billion dollars. Those MySpace visitors listened to music, scoped out crushes, made plans with friends, decided that
Stephen Colbert was cool--and in the process altered the way we think about and use the Internet. Meanwhile, Friendster fell to
13th place among social networks in the U.S. and saw its market share decline to 0.3 percent.

In the business and technology media, the fall of Friendster has been widely portrayed as an isolated management failure--with
Abrams shouldering most of the blame. Indeed, Friendster now has the dubious honor of being the focus of a Harvard Business
School case study on how not to manage a tech company. It ran out of money last year and was recapitalized at a valuation of $3
million, effectively making it a subsidiary of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of its VC investors. The recap stripped
Abrams of his board seat and almost all of his equity. The founder, now an outsider, retains roughly 4 percent of the company,
which has since received more venture capital but has yet to turn a profit. Most observers agree that while Friendster might still
swing a modest sale, a big acquisition or an IPO is out of the question. "Everyone saw this as a no-brainer, as 'How could they
screw it up?" says Russell Siegelman, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and a current board member at Friendster. "But not all
the deals we do work."

Statements like that are just one more thing that gets under Abrams's skin. He's a prickly sort, with lots of opinions and little
reluctance to share them. However, until I tracked him down at his bar last October, he had been uncharacteristically reticent
about Friendster. But over the course of several hours (and during interviews in the months that followed), Abrams laid out a
narrative that is decidedly different from the one put forth by the Silicon Valley VCs, bloggers, and journalists. He argues that
Friendster fizzled not only because it fell victim to mismanagement, but because he embraced a system that is designed to create
far more failures than successes. Friendster, he believes, was not simply a singular failure, but a systematic one. And he's
determined that things be different with his new Web venture, Socializr. "In the old days, entrepreneurs would bootstrap and
figure things out over the first few years," he says. "The VCs come in too early these days."

Abrams is not the only one who feels this way. "The basic venture capital system is structured so that there are built-in conflicts of
interest between the VC and the entrepreneur," says Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek, a New York City software company, and
writer of the popular blog Joel on Software. It's a point that even some investors are willing to concede. "Most VC firms have
adopted a model where they make 20 investments and have two hits," says Peter Rip, a partner with San Francisco-based
Crosslink Capital, which has backed such companies as Good Technology and TiVo. The traditional VC model works fine for
investors, since the returns from one Google far outweigh the losses from nine Friendsters. It's fine for the VCs themselves, who
reap healthy management fees regardless of the outcome. And it's fine for the network of professional managers who bounce from
start-up to start-up, earning well wherever they go.

But it isn't much good for an entrepreneur who has a promising idea--and who would prefer odds that are better than 20 to 2.
Spolsky believes that working with a VC imposes a level of risk that someone prepared to invest his life--not to mention his life
savings--in a single enterprise simply should not tolerate. "An entrepreneur would rather have a 100 percent chance of owning an
$80 million company than a 10 percent chance of having a $800 million one," he says.

Friendster never felt like a long shot to Abrams, who seemed to understand Silicon Valley as well as just about anyone. He came
to Netscape in 1996 as a software engineer, having worked several years for Canadian telecom giant Nortel. He spent a year and a
half at Netscape, writing code for the Navigator Web browser and immersing himself in the culture of the time and place,
becoming a regular at meetings of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and the Software Development Forum.

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Abrams left Netscape in 1998, and nine months later started HotLinks, an early foray into what is now called "social search."
Abrams's idea - to organize webpages based on users' favorite sites - was prescient and would eventually appear in the form of
successful ventures like Digg and Del.icio.us. Over the course of a year and a half, HotLinks attracted 500,000 registered users,
but it ran out of money in the wake of the technology collapse. In the spring of 2001, HotLinks merged with a British software
company, and Abrams left to work for another start-up.

As he suffered through the dot-com bust, Abrams began mulling a new idea: software that would somehow integrate one's online
and offline identities. "The way people interacted online was either anonymous or through aliases or handles," he says. "I wanted
to bring that real-life context that you had offline online--so instead of Cyberdude307, I would be Jonathan." Abrams was also
mindful of Gary Kremen's Match.com, which eight years after its founding was finally coming into its own. Now part of IAC, the
site was booking $76 million a year in revenue--roughly one-quarter of the $300 million online dating industry in 2002. Abrams
saw that the cultural perception of online dating had changed. "All of a sudden, people who I would not think of as strange and
desperate--normal people--were talking about using Match.com," he says.

Friendster crystallized in the summer of 2002 while Abrams was walking with a friend in a Santa Clara park. They were chatting
about the online-offline problem and out popped the idea: Each person would have a standardized homepage, à la Match.com. But
instead of simply advertising their interests and good looks, users could link their profiles to those of their friends, creating a
network of connections that would mirror those that existed in the real world. His friend liked the idea, and Abrams started work
immediately. Three months later, he had a prototype, which he posted on the fallow server of a friend's failed dot-com. He sent
invitations to about 20 of his closest friends, unsure of what would happen next. "The least likely thing in my mind was starting
another company," he says. "I wasn't sure what I was going to do."

Abrams's invention--which would be awarded patent number 7,069,308 four years later as a "system, method, and apparatus for
connecting users in an online computer system"--was far more enticing than he initially imagined. As an online dating tool, it
represented a potential improvement over Match.com because users could figure out if they had acquaintances in common with a
potential mate, thus bypassing the awkward unsolicited e-mail in favor of an introduction by a mutual friend. But beyond its
applications in dating, Abrams's software was compelling as a pure idea.

The beauty of Friendster was its exhaustively complete network. Every time a homepage loaded, Friendster's servers calculated a
single user's connection to other users within four degrees of separation, which could mean hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Because the network was constantly changing as new users joined and connected with one another, these calculations had to
happen on the fly - in what would eventually amount to trillions of rapid calculations. The effect was to give users a vivid sense of
how they fit into their social groups as well as into the larger world. Abrams, it seemed, had created a piece of software that could
tell us who we were.

Prototype in hand, Abrams began looking for seed funding. He delivered his first pitch on Thanksgiving Day in 2002 to a former
HotLinks vice president, Melissa Lloyd, over dinner with Lloyd and her husband at their home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Abrams's
hosts had no idea what he was talking about but agreed to invest a few thousand dollars anyway. "We believed in Jonathan,"
Lloyd says. "So we said, 'Here's your money; we don't want to hear about it again." The Lloyds sent Abrams home with a check
for several thousand dollars and eventually invested tens of thousands more. What happened next, says Lloyd, who now lives in
Seattle, was "one of the most exciting times of my business life."

Over the next few months, Abrams rounded up $400,000 from a dozen investors. He opened Friendster in March 2003. The site
grew virally as Abrams's friends invited their friends, and by June it had 835,000 registered members. Four months later, there
were more than two million, generating some 10 million page views per day. The growth presented immediate engineering
headaches. In theory, Abrams's intricate network was a beautiful thing. In practice, the constant calculations, which were being
continuously served on millions of homepages, required more than a terrabyte of expensive RAM memory. By late 2003, load
times regularly clocked in at over a minute and users were beginning to complain in blogs and forums. Abrams's software would
need to be scaled somehow. "We would fix one problem, and then a few days later there would be another bottleneck," recalls Ian
McFarland, a software developer who joined Friendster in April 2003. Simply buying enough servers to keep up with the growth
was a major challenge.

The problem might have been solved if someone had reworked the software to ignore distant connections--for example, by
calculating only connections between friends. But Friendster's engineers were so preoccupied with day-to-day slowdowns that
they neglected to step back and ask what was causing them. Abrams, for his part, was distracted by business needs: hiring,
recruiting investors, looking at partnerships, and--most time-consuming of all--public relations. Between March and October of
2003 Friendster was all over the media. Time called it one of the best inventions of 2003 and Entertainment Weekly named
Abrams "Friendliest Man of the Year" in its annual "Breakout Stars" issue. With no outside PR help and no marketing personnel,
Abrams handled everything from talk show appearances to chatting with reporters. While the press coverage was exciting--and
undeniably helpful in building Friendster's user base and increasing its attractiveness to a burgeoning online ad marketplace--it
monopolized his attention, preventing him from making even small fixes that would have dramatically improved the site's
performance.

If the engineering challenges at Friendster were obvious, Abrams was having too much fun to worry. He assumed that with
enough money and the right people, the problems would solve themselves. By July 2003, with the site pushing a million members,
Abrams raised $1 million from Ram Shriram, an early investor in Google; Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal; and Tim Koogle,
who'd served as CEO of Yahoo from 1995 to 2001. Three months later, he turned down a $30 million acquisition offer from
Google in favor of a $13 million VC round from Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital, at a valuation of $53 million. The deal,
one of the first big transactions since the bursting of the tech bubble, was widely portrayed as the harbinger of a dot-com
renaissance. In December, the Venture Capital Journal called social networking "the new Internet gamble," adding that "the Net is
hot again."

Kleiner and Benchmark were, in fact, so eager to grab a piece of Friendster that they agreed to a highly unusual condition: a $4.7
million cash payout for Abrams. Nonetheless, Abrams believes he made a critical mistake in negotiating the deal. He kept about a
third of the company's stock but no longer had control of the five-person board. The deal specified that "preferred" shareholders--
the VCs--would pick two board members, that Abrams would pick two, and that there would be a tiebreaker who would be
mutually acceptable to both sides. Abrams says he didn't pay much attention to the issue because he had resolved to let the
experienced VCs take charge.

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As Friendster entered 2004, Abrams tapped Tim Koogle to join the board; he took a seat himself. Roger Lee, a partner at Battery
Ventures, took the mutual seat, while the preferred seats went to Kleiner's John Doerr, a director at Amazon and Google, and
Benchmark's Bob Kagle, the VC who discovered eBay. Abrams agreed to let Koogle run the company as interim CEO while the
two men focused on building a professional management team. To fix Friendster's engineering woes, they hired Jeff Winner,
who'd co-founded Collabra Software, a business collaboration tool sold to Netscape in 1995 for $108 million in stock. John
Briggs, a seven-year veteran of Yahoo, was hired as VP of product management. Mary Lou Song, employee No. 3 at eBay, was
charged with managing the rapidly expanding user base. The CEO job went to Scott Sassa, who had been president of NBC West
Coast, overseeing hits like The West Wing. He was a well-connected entertainment executive who could credibly strike content
deals with traditional media companies.

Each of the new hires came to Friendster with strong ideas about how to make the company as big as possible as fast as possible,
with an eye toward a big exit for the investors. With new rivals--most notably, MySpace and Facebook--emerging, they wanted to
move fast. But agreeing on a game plan turned out to be a problem. "There was this leadership battle on top that was like a war in
Valhalla," says Chris Lunt, who joined Friendster in 2003 and took over as director of engineering when Winner left in late 2004.
"Everybody had their own agenda." The result was a kind of corporate schizophrenia. Rather than improving the software,
Friendster went on a partnership binge, resulting in a hodgepodge of incongruous and poorly integrated features: blogs (with Six
Apart), video sharing (with Grouper), personalized searches (with Eurekster), VoIP (with GloPhone), and Internet radio (with
Pandora).

The tenor of the board meetings quickly deteriorated, with Abrams becoming increasingly isolated from the board, which now
also included Sassa. "We had an inexperienced founder and a lot of experienced and high-powered board members," says
Kleiner's Siegelman. "There were too many cooks in the kitchen." Abrams, the board's chairman, hardly considered himself
inexperienced and felt ignored by his five colleagues, who, he says, generally sided with Doerr. He was particularly vexed by the
company's apparent obsession with partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with AOL," he
recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his
chairmanship. He stopped coming into the office regularly.

In hindsight, the decision to marginalize Abrams, an experienced engineer, probably was a bad move. Rather than address the
problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's
leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than
$1 million on a Hitachi storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months. Although Winner claims
the rewrite was successful, load times continued to be a problem as late as 2006, according to Chander Sarna, Friendster's current
vice president of engineering. "The ex-Friendster people are not going to like me for saying this, but there was a lack of spending
discipline," Sarna says. "There were very basic problems that good code writers should have fixed to begin with."

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. "It was the most frustrating
place to work," says Lunt. At the board level, Siegelman says, there was a realization that the management team was
"dysfunctional," but the board was loath to micromanage. "The pot kept getting stirred, but nobody said, 'I'm turning down the
flame because this isn't the right recipe," he says.

Meanwhile, scant attention was paid to Friendster's users. Lunt remembers marveling sometime in early 2004 at how Friendster's
traffic would mysteriously spike at 2 a.m. 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 32-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. 1 Filipino social network. 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 2004 after only a year in business. A mere nine months later, it
would be clocking 22 million unique users per month in the U.S., compared with 1.1 million for Friendster.

Sources:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster
• http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea.html
• http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/friendster-autopsy/ ***Nothing Follows***

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