Friendster Suicidal ?

Perhaps Friendster isn't run by idiot savants, perhaps its run by suicidal businessmen. The latest maneuver? They seem to be experimenting with killing the bulletin board feature. Its no longer on the front page and all old post are gone. Now perhaps its a tech glitch, but I suspect not.

The bulletin board is one of Friendster's best features, and also one of its most dangerous. It lets people broadcast messages to their friends network, allowing information to spread quickly. Its great for announcing events, travel plans and the like. There is a whole class of information worthy of being broadcast to friends but not quite worth sending an email blast. Its a great information space and Friendster is one of the best tools for accessing it.

The problem is that people are using it to organize against Friendster's management. Messages spread pretty quickly when they automatically get sent to say 50 or 100 people each post. And often those messages are critical of Friendster policies. If management are really trying to change the boards I suspect this is a big part of it.

The larger reason for the change would be that people are using the boards for something other then dating. What a shock, its called Friendster and people are acting like friends! CEO Abrams is a touch dense though and somehow thinks its a dating only space. But I've got news for him, if it were it would die in days. Sure you can use it to find dates and maybe one or two or its 2 million plus users have. But most users just it to connect and communicate with their friends. And the larger the network, the more useful it is, so all these heretics are actually making the dating aspect more valuable. If the only function was dating, the network would shrivel up and its usefulness decrease dramatically.

Unlike some I think it will be pretty easy to monetize Friendster without killing it. There is plenty of room to add premium services to the model. And honestly I suspect it might be one space where online ads might actually draw real cash. But its success lies in maintaining a very large and diverse network of people. The business is the network so why does the management seem to want to kill it?

Posted by William Blaze at October 1, 2003 02:16 PM | TrackBack