[Sigia-l] Your take on MySpace/Friendster/Tribe

[Stephanie Hornung]

i think the bigger issue with friendster was two-fold: (1) it took  
off much faster than they anticipated and their servers couldn't deal  
with the load so it was *extremely* slow  (2) in an attempt to  
alleviate the loads they began restricting the number of friends an  
account could have.

when friendster first took off there was a large influx of "fakester"  
accounts -- accounts that were for groups, places, famous  
personalities, characters, etc.  these accounts tended to have  
500-1,000 friends which reportedly taxed the system quite a bit.  so  
they cracked down and deleted them.

there was definitely a user experience/customer relationship issue  
there that attributed to its crash.  users felt like the "man" was  
trying to control them by telling them what they could and couldn't  
do with the system.  therein lies the issue -- as much as you may  
design a system for a specific purpose (in friendster's case it was  
meant to be a dating site), you shouldn't try and control what a  
community is going to do with it.  let people do what they want, and  
then facilitate that.

-stephanie

On Feb 22, 2006, at 1:28 PM, Davezilla wrote:

> Friendster, like Multiply, Blogshares and MeetUp, succumbed to a rumor
> mill among users who quickly left for other communities. Whether true
> or not, the rumor circulating was, "Don't join; this is just a front
> to steal your email address and sell it." Flickr and Tribe are not
> perceived that way by the majority of the user base.
>
> --
> Color me gone,
> Davezilla
> http://davezilla.com/
>
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