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Eric Eldon over at VentureBeat has written an excellent article demonstrating the resurgence of Friendster, the service that pioneered the concept of social networking. The resurgence has been made possible due to enormous user traction in the Asian markets, specially China.
Eric’s article has not only raised the stakes in the battle for Asian markets among the social networks, but must have also increased the valuation of Friendster many fold. Another important but subtle point that has been made is that theoretically it is possible for a "Dead" service or company to rise from its grave. From what I have seen till now there is only one company (Apple - thanks to Steve Jobs) that not only re-surged but topped past glory.
Eric argues that the current growth is attributed to the connected nature of social networks, where every friend has many friends and those many friends in turn have many more friends, thus making it almost impossible for any of them to leave the network. The argument is quiet true, but there are exceptions and we know it well by now. Because if this would have been a universal fact, friendster would have never lost its top position to MySpace, which in turn lost it to Facebook.
The reason Friendster got abandoned was that it had immense scaling problems due to the reason that the founding team didn’t thought that the site could become so popular. And when that happened, the service couldn’t simply serve its user population. Friendster blamed all of it on the initial development decision to use Java as the platform to build Friendster upon and decided to switch to PHP, but it was way too late by than.
This is where the Friendster’s similarities with Twitter starts. Twitter, like Friendster is a service that pioneered the concept of microblogging. Twitter’s founding team also never thought that the service will become so popular (I hate writing this sentence, if they weren’t thinking about getting big, what the hell were they aiming at). And when all hell broke loose, twitter’s development team blamed it on Ruby on Rails, the framework on which twitter was built. Similar to Friendster, Twitter is also thinking about abandoning its initial development framework, ruby on rails in this case. The problems with Twitter are even worse, they have started to flag certain accounts on the pre-text of them being spamming the service. Needless to say that these are accounts with large number of followers and friends.
Even if Friendster manages to rise and shine once again, the founders and initial investors won’t be getting anything out of it, as the last round of funds were injected into a recapitalized and restructured company. I really wish and pray that Twitter somehow, anyhow overcomes its worries and go on to make big bucks with the idea that they have pioneered. But they have much in common with Friendster, a case in point that Social Networks could go south.
Update:
Just as I posted this article, I have come across Jesse Stays post titled "Developers Bailing on Twitter" in which he argues that if and when developers will jump ship from Twitter, the users will in-advertently do the same. And the developers are throwing in the towels already. An excerpt from Jesse’s post reads:
I’m very worried for Twitter. As more developers jump ship and work on other platforms such as Plurk and FriendFeed (which really isn’t a direct competitor to Twitter), this great tool is going to be left in the dust with no new development and large networks of people moving elsewhere. Twitter’s largest traffic comes from the API itself, and as that traffic dies down, so will Twitter. Imagine, for instance, if Seesmic were to stop development on Twhirl due to the costs associated with keeping up with API flaws? That would be quite a chunk of Twitter’s users being forced over to the other Twhirl clients, FriendFeed and Seesmic itself - it’s such an easy transition were Twitter support to be dropped! What happens when Twhirl begins supporting Plurk?
Today I got my twitter account re-activated after 20 odd days. The account was flagged as spam due to the reason that it had a large number of followers and all updates had a link (a link to startup meme post). After logging into the account for a few minutes my updates have been paused, reason being that my update reception limit has exceeded.
