Friendster founder in 2014

For those that remember friendster in the early 2000s, this is an interview with the founder. Pretty to read it. Friendster was the original social network before myspace and facebook. It had a lot of users and seemed promising when it was first released. If they would have pushed the marketing I think it would have been bigger.

“It was a really weird time. Friendster at the time was still a very small company,” he says. “We viewed ourselves as the David, not the Goliath. There were the Yahoos and the AOLs and we were this tiny, little startup. But the moment Friendster got the publicity, people started to copy it. Of course we were aware of all of them.” Even with all that competition, Abrams recognized early on that Facebook might pose a unique threat. On Friendster, users could set up profiles, connect with friends and family, search for new contacts (and, yes, potential dates) based on the people you were already connected to and interact with people on the social network through messages and groups. It was essentially a more pared down version of Facebook and the latter had the added benefit of quickly gaining popularity among college students.

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