Shanti’s Dispatches

Just finished a great writeup on the Friendster flameout. There were a ton of issues that caused the great flameout.

One of the recurring themes that keeps popping up in articles about the debacle, is a feature on Friendster that allowed you to calculate degrees of networks, etc as you were browsing your friends of friends profiles.

Personally, I don’t even remember this feature. Yet I still loved Friendster and was on there quite a bit during its heyday.

Sometimes, we fall in love with certain features and make a bigger deal out of them than perhaps users of our own software / webapps.

If the Friendster engineers had made the difficult choice of “killing their darling” intensive network-calculation feature, could they have eeked out another few months and ended up #1? I don’t know. Probably not, but it could’ve helped forestall the inevitable.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos