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June 26, 2004
Friendster is desperate; viral marketing failed
Posted by danah boyd
Friendster realizes that it has lost the attention of its earliest adopters. This morning, Friendster sent a message to a select number of people that they labeled as “SuperFriends.” It’s a usability survey where they are asking for users’ advice on an email campaign. There are four different potential emails that they sent out as screen shots. Here’s a sample one:
Subject: Friendster Now
So you’re working. Who cares? You have a lifetime to work. What you’ll really regret coughing and wheezing on your deathbed is not looking up all the old high-school friends, college buddies, summer camp alums, Burning Man acquaintances and ex’es who are just hoping you reach out and find them. And discovering new hiking partners, book groups and jam band fans. And setting up that person you really would date yourself if you were single. There’s oh so much to do.
Seriously, you should go to Burning Man. It’s pretty cool. The jam band stuff we understand if you’re not into. We just needed an example there.
Thanks.
www.friendster.com
Oh, to make sure you keep getting these vaguely sarcastic emails, please add Friendster to your email address book now. If for no other reason than it will look cool to have Friendster in your address book.
The tone of these messages is desperate, begging for attention of the original early adopters - the ones that Abrams told me were ruining his system. One focuses on Burning Man types; one mocks the old Power Point COO; one charges non-users with harming children; one is a desperate love poem. They’re hyper American-centric, SF-centric, white collar, wannabee hipster, intentionally attempting sarcasm (and clarifying that below) and complete with 80s references.
I guess Friendster isn’t happy with the majority of its users being young and from Asia. Does this mean that Friendster has its tail between its legs about its early egotistical behavior? Apparently, viral marketing isn’t working well enough anymore.
Anyhow, you have to read the full message that these SuperFriends got. It has had me ROFL for hours.
Comments (9)
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1. Tom Maszerowski on June 28, 2004 11:36 AM writes...
Friendster's site performance is best described as "slow, with periodic periods of total stoppage", that more than anything has soured me on it. It strikes me as a great idea that didn't scale up well. Other sites, like Tribe and LinkedIn, seem to be much better engineered.
Permalink to Comment2. Stewart Butterfield on June 28, 2004 4:48 PM writes...
God knows why I'm always in the position of defending Frienster, but FWIW they have over 10,000,000 people using the system now, despite the long eight months or whatever of almost complete unusability (it is very fast now; they've invested a lot in engineering and hardware as well as having removed the hardest technical challenges by limited most stuff to 3 degrees). Not sure if I could agree that viral marketing failed :)
Permalink to Comment3. zephoria on June 28, 2004 5:14 PM writes...
Stewart - their return-user rate has dropped dramatically; many people are terminating their accounts and Alexa shows that they are stable if not in decline in terms of traffic. They may have 10M registered users, but they are not active and the increase in Fakesters and young-ins is intense.
My main point re: viral marketing is that it is not working for them now and they are reverting to old-skool mechanisms. Furthermore, the virality did not create a stable user base.
Permalink to Comment4. Paul on June 28, 2004 6:28 PM writes...
"They may have 10M registered users, but they are not active and the increase in Fakesters and young-ins is intense."
Does Friendster somewhere publish its statistics ? How are you aware of the percentage of Fakesters ? I see their 3 month PageView rank in Alexa to be up by 37.
Permalink to CommentTheir Alexa traffic "rank" right now is 151, where myspace is 438, orkut.com is 1,242, and tribe.net is 6,696.
In terms of overall rank, it looks like they're getting more than monster.com, realnetworks, and symantec, the anti-virus company. I can't see how friendster can be seen at all to be desperate.
5. zephoria on June 28, 2004 6:48 PM writes...
I do not know the percentage of Fakesters, but i'm constantly talking with different clusters of users and have been paying as much attention to the Asian Friendsters as possible. Searches for common Fakesters are definitely producing more results than they have since the Fakester genocide (classics like Homer Simpson, Jesus, etc.). Plus, i keep hearing about the fraudulent-styled Fakesters which were not that present early on. This is particularly coming from Asian users.
The desperation reference comes from the tone of these messages.
Permalink to Comment6. Paul on June 28, 2004 8:22 PM writes...
I'm not understanding your point. I can't see anything in the Alexa rankings that would indicate that Friendster is somehow doomed, but yet I'm seeing on blogs all over people saying that it's in trouble.
My suspicion is that people love to hate Friendster, or at least love to hate Abrams.
I'm not sure how big a sample size you'd need in order to get a conclusive idea about the Asian population is, but I suspect that any ordinary user wouldn't be able to come to that without somehow getting access to Friendster's usage statistics.
I also see that your Friendster profile hasn't been logged into since 3/18...Does that mean that you're using a fakester account ?
Permalink to CommentShame on you. :)
7. zephoria on June 28, 2004 8:37 PM writes...
Nope - just a pseudonym.
Permalink to Comment8. Cynthia Typaldos on June 29, 2004 1:20 AM writes...
Posted in my blog on 9/11/03
http://typaldos.blogspot.com/2003/09/i-dont-remember-this-being-discussed.html
I don't think Friendster has a successful business model if it is a subscription fee. The person who is most needed on the site, the matchmaker, has no motivation to join. And the matchmaking is only convincing if the matchmaker knows both of the people who are seeking a date. Is it really necessary to have a system that tells you who you already know? And the reputation system rewards not matchmaking, but the gathering of "friends" whether real or fake. For more on this go to: http://typaldos.com/word.documents/profguilds/nodes/ .
Permalink to Comment9. Michael Sarnefors on July 2, 2004 5:16 AM writes...
Wedgewse has just published "The Irresistible Outbreak of Trust", The Wedgewise Viral Marketing eBrief, a summary of the first 100 search engine results for "viral marketing" (over 120 articles analyzed), check it out at http://www.wedgewise.com, thanks!
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