I can still remember when Friendster was in its hey days. My first account on the web aside from my email, of course, is with Friendster. It was the granddaddy of social networking media, let us admit it, even before MySpace and Facebook has taken over the limelight. It functions like Facebook and has a lot of applications too. It allows its users to build connections of friends, upload photos and videos and enables comment sharing and a lot of other things.
Friendster was founded by computer programmer Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin in 2002. When Friendster.com went public on March 22, 2002, it became a worldwide sensation. It was a phenomenon then. It has been awarded several awards and recognitions. A lot of magazines have featured Friendster and its founders. It has a hundred and fifteen million users worldwide by 2008. And in that same year its Alexa ranking has decreased from 40 to 800. What went wrong? Well aside from the rise of other social networking sites there must have been a management issue which has been supported by interviews with the founders. Abrams once said, that Friendster's purpose is: “to change the way people communicated with one another.” But it seemed Abrams had failed. According to Fortune on October 2003, “there might be emerging websites that connect people to people not people to websites.” Has Abrams been mistaken when he said that? In 2011, Friendster transformed from being a social networking site to a total entertainment site focused on gaming and music.
Now Friendster has been replaced by other social networking sites but despite that fact it will always be the first networking site to be known.
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