Friendster, every mention
39 scenes · ← back to Friendster
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 20Ben Gilbert 13Mark Zuckerberg 2Peter Fenton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Friendster comes up
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:15:47 David Rosenthal So there was a Turkish engineer who worked for Google named Orkut Bukokhtin, and his passion was social networking, and Friendster was a thing at the time, and so January, 2004, before Gmail, before the Google IPO, before Facebook launches…
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 27:35 David Rosenthal He discovers this thing called Friendster, another social network out there, and Adam is like, whoa,
- ▶ 27:51 David Rosenthal Now, Friendster was based out here in Silicon Valley, had raised money from Kleiner Perkins.
- ▶ 28:34 David Rosenthal So here's Friendster, this example of, like, a real standalone company, social network, growing virally, funded by venture capitalists, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- ▶ 28:51 David Rosenthal And by the end of the summer in 2003, Friendster had over three million users.
- ▶ 29:00 Ben Gilbert Friendster had real scale and grew really fast.
- ▶ 29:06 Ben Gilbert Friendster is like the butt of a lot of jokes, but it exploded out of the gates.
- ▶ 29:11 David Rosenthal So Adam's playing around with Friendster, and Friendster had this feature called Testimonials, which was kind of like a Facebook wall, but in the long run, one of the core problems with Friendster was it positioned itself as a social…
- ▶ 30:04 David Rosenthal So, Adam, while he's playing around with this, and he's telling Mark about it, he actually posts on Mark's Friendster profile a testimonial, and he says that, quote, Mark gets way too lucky, and he posted this in the summer of 2003.
- ▶ 31:11 David Rosenthal He was looking at Friendster.
- ▶ 41:24 Ben Gilbert And Friendsters out there.
- ▶ 49:19 Ben Gilbert Friendster existed.
- ▶ 53:12 David Rosenthal Contrast that with an approach of something like Friendster, that's default open to everybody, backed by Silicon Valley venture dollars, trying to grow, they're doing marketing.
- ▶ 53:23 David Rosenthal Ok, let's say somebody in Ohio hears about Friendster somehow, maybe they see an ad for it, they sign up.
- ▶ 1:01:32 Ben Gilbert Friendsters out there trying to compute second degree friends of friends, which is this crazy hard computer science problem, especially as the global number of people growing, it's an n squared problem.
- ▶ 1:01:50 Ben Gilbert So even anything that's n squared is contained within that school, and their servers aren't falling over and taking twenty-plus seconds to load pages the way that the friendsters of the world are.
- ▶ 1:02:28 David Rosenthal Everything you were just talking about that Friendster couldn't do and that Myspace couldn't do.
- ▶ 1:14:26 David Rosenthal And Sean, I believe, had actually been an advisor to Friendster as well.
- ▶ 1:14:29 David Rosenthal So he was, like, between Plaxo and Napster, Friendster, really believed social networking was gonna become a thing.
- ▶ 1:23:14 Ben Gilbert They actually knew each other because Reid was an early investor in Friendster.
- ▶ 1:24:58 Ben Gilbert And they're kind of conflicted, both with Friendster and LinkedIn.
- ▶ 1:43:13 Ben Gilbert If you think about what Friendster and MySpace were, you could upload a limited set of photos, which, by the way, you'd have to delete one to add another.
- ▶ 1:47:02 David Rosenthal I mean, certainly Flickr, Myspace, Friendster couldn't hold a candle to that type of engagement.
- ▶ 1:59:05 Ben Gilbert And you compare all the metrics with Friendster and Myspace as time went on got worse.
- ▶ 1:59:21 Ben Gilbert Friendster just was not architected properly.
- ▶ 1:59:37 Ben Gilbert And so, as you sort of looked at not the high level metrics of how many users have ever signed up, because MySpace and Friendster, I think we're still way ahead at this point.
- ▶ 5:57:34 unnamed speaker Myspace and Friendster, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp.
- ▶ 5:58:26 unnamed speaker And it kind of goes back to Adam D'Angelo's Friendster testimonial about him being way too lucky, and then realizing it's not luck at all.
- ▶ 6:02:58 unnamed speaker Mark even makes some comment about, well, actually the idea for Facebook wasn't even new because MySpace and Friendster existed.
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:29:19 Mark Zuckerberg So, you know, you talk about, like, Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had during the graph calculations of, like, all right, do you know this person?
- ▶ 1:29:31 David Rosenthal I mean, um, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science,
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 21:05 Mark Zuckerberg So, you know, you talk about, like, Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had during the graph calculations of, like, all right, do you know this person?
- ▶ 21:18 David Rosenthal I mean, um, it seems quaint now, Friendster, MySpace, but you study computer science,
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:23:49 Peter Fenton oh, I mean, we can think of companies like Friendster and think, oh, but the bad idea of poorly executed is kind of an apex.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 2:26:12 David Rosenthal Well, specifically what happened was Benchmark had invested in Friendster, and so was conflicted out.
- ▶ 2:26:23 David Rosenthal And supposedly, I think it was Bob Kegel who was on the board of Friendster, and at that point, there had been some CEO turnover at Friendster.
- ▶ 2:26:33 David Rosenthal Newzle and Founder's Den was the original founder of Friendster.
- ▶ 2:26:43 David Rosenthal They had brought in Tim Kugel as CEO of Friendster at that point.
- ▶ 2:26:53 Ben Gilbert They never got to look at it because of Friendster?