Jonathan Abrams, a local programmer, Ryze member, and inveterate partyer, saw an opportunity to focus on the nonwork part of people’s lives. He built a very social network for consumers and called it Friendster. Though it wasn’t exactly a dating site, it offered many tools to help members find dates. Abrams gambled that he could take customers away from Match.com, as the idea was that you’d meet more interesting people if you got to know the friends of your friends. Members were expected to use their real names, and Friendster gave you a novel tool to keep track of people—the very one that sixdegrees’ Weinreich had pined for. Their pictures appeared next to their names right on their profile. This was a breakthrough. You could search to learn which people lived near you who were already friends of a friend. If you liked their picture, you could try to connect.
When Friendster launched in February 2003 it was an immediate hit. Within months it had several million users. To join you needed an invitation from an existing user, which were much in demand. Pretty soon people were talking about Friendster as the “next Google.” It even reportedly turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google itself. Back in Boston, Mark Zuckerberg took notice and joined, as did other Harvard undergraduates, including the Winkelvoss twins.
Friendster seemed to be hitting the big time. Abrams made magazine covers. But by the middle of the year the experience of users started spiraling downward. Millions were joining and Friendster’s servers were slowing. It couldn’t manage its success. Pages took twenty seconds to load. It also started to have public relations troubles—it engaged in a very public battle with so-called “fakesters,” users who were deliberately creating Friendster profiles using phony names and identities, including cartoon characters and dogs. Abrams was resolute that people on Friendster should use their real names, and he kicked lots of the fakesters off. Aiming in part to solve its expensive technical challenges, the company took a big infusion of money in fall 2003 from two eminent venture capital funds—$13 million from Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
A recent visit to the San Francisco office of Friendster founder Abrams, now operating an online invitations business called Socializr, finds him scruffy-bearded, contrite, and still eager to party. The first thing he does when I walk in is offer me a tequila. He interrupts the interview several times to reiterate the offer, despite my repeated refusals. “The site didn’t work well for two years—that’s a fact,” he concedes, finally getting down to business. Then he explains how a series of engineering misjudgments prevented Friendster from repairing its performance problems until long after he was removed by the investors as CEO in March 2004.
Abrams is one of social networking’s great innovators, but he willingly concedes he built on the ideas of others. “The concepts were not new,” he says. “What was new was the vibe of it, the design, the features.” But the fact is, as Sean Parker puts it, “Jonathan cracked the code. He defined the basic structure of what we now call a social network.”
In Friendster’s wake, a throng of social networking sites blossomed in San Francisco attempting to duplicate its appeal. Each tackled the idea of connecting people in a slightly different way. One was Tickle, a service which, on observing Friendster’s broad-based appeal, altered its own service, which had previously been based on self-administered quizzes and tests. Two of the other new social sites—LinkedIn and Tribe.net—were founded by friends of Abrams.
Reid Hoffman had been the lead angel investor in Friendster’s very first financing, putting in $20,000 of the total $100,000 Abrams raised. Hoffman is a pivotal figure in the history of social networking. One of Silicon Valley’s most thoughtful executives, he carries a substantial amount of industry credibility in his stout frame. Way back in August 1997 he started a dating service called SocialNet, which tried to find matches based on information users put in a profile. Some call it the very first social network, though Hoffman doesn’t. In any case, it didn’t do very well as a business (though when it was sold, its investors made their money back). But in May 2003, three months after the launch of Friendster, Hoffman founded LinkedIn, a social network for businesspeople. Hoffman believed that social networking was likely to divide into two categories—personal and business—so this was not a conflict with his support of Friendster. LinkedIn, which thrives to this day, has a lot in common with Ryze. Your profile is basically your résumé. Users look for jobs and ask others for business recommendations or advice. But in keeping with its businesslike attitude, it started without photos. (Hoffman added that capability later.)
Mark Pincus plays Laurel to Hoffman’s Hardy. Skinny, medium-height, and hyperactive, Pincus was another Friendster investor and Hoffman’s buddy. In May 2003, the same time that Hoffman was launching LinkedIn, Pincus unveiled Tribe.net, a social network where members could create a “tribe” around a specific interest. Tribe.net was originally intended to help members share Craigslist-type classifieds so they could buy things from people they knew. Its tribal quality, however, quickly became its trademark, and its most cohesive online tribes were not the ordinary-Joe ones Pincus had envisioned. They included regular attendees at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada as well as devotees of alternative sexual practices, more interested in just connecting than in buying and selling things.
Sean Parker fell in with this San Francisco social networking mafia. At that time, Parker shared a house with Stanford students in Palo Alto, where Friendster was already taking off, and several of these guys were already in his own real-world social network. Ryze’s Adrian Scott had been an early Napster investor. And Tribe’s Pincus had founded Freeloader, the Arlington, Virginia, start-up where Parker interned in 1994 at age fifteen. Soon Parker was hanging out with them and their friend Abrams of Friendster.
Parker and Abrams quickly bonded. And the more he hung around Abrams, the more Parker became fascinated by Friendster. He began spending lots of time at the Friendster offices. He helped Abrams find additional investors and acquired a small amount of Friendster stock himself. That was just when the service started to bend and break under the load of its newfound popularity. “I watched from the sidelines as they lost the war,” says Parker now. “The story always was: ‘One more month, one more month. We’ll get it working.’” (Friendster was later resuscitated, but too late for the U.S. market. Now about 60 percent of users are in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.)
In the summer of 2003, just as Tribe.net and LinkedIn began to grow, an unexpected development got Pincus and Hoffman worried. They learned that the patent held by the now-extinct sixdegrees was being put up for auction by its new owners. The patent is broad and sweeping. It describes a social network service that maintains a database, enables a member to create an account, then encourages him or her to invite others to connect to their network via email. If this other person accepts the invitation and confirms his friendship, the service creates a two-way communications connection. These processes are at the heart of most social networks.
Lawyers for the two entrepreneurs told them that in the wrong hands the patent could be used to stop both of their companies, or pretty much any social networking firm. They decided to try to buy it. They also knew that Friendster was getting millions of dollars from the VCs, and worried that with more resources Friendster might attempt to elbow into their parts of the industry. Owning the patent was a form of defense. However, neither company’s board would authorize buying the patent. So Hoffman and Pincus decided to use their own money.
But they weren’t the only ones who had recognized the patent’s potency. Yahoo was beginning to realize it might have missed the social networking boat. It entered the auction and actually put in the highest bid. But Hoffman and Pincus, gung-ho, were willing to pay faster and won with a bid of $700,000.
The two now say they just wanted to keep the patent out of the hands of larger players like Yahoo or Friendster. “We were worried that someone was going to buy the patent and then sue all the early social networking compani
es,” says Hoffman now. “We bought it defensively, to make sure no one would kill the nascent industry.”
But even as these entrepreneurs were creating a new industry in San Francisco, an unlikely competitor emerged from nowhere, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles. MySpace began as one of scores of Friendster clones—MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson was an avid Friendster user. Anderson got the idea to start MySpace in part out of frustration as Friendster slowed and crashed. But, according to Stealing MySpace, the definitive history of MySpace, by Julia Angwin, Anderson also thought he could deliberately appeal to the so-called fakesters, “to create a site where users could create any identity they liked.” He and co-founder Chris DeWolfe put few restrictions on how you could use MySpace.
The two were employees of an unwieldy and disorganized Net conglomerate called eUniverse, which secretly installed spyware on users’ PCs and sold expensive and questionably advertised merchandise. There they applied their libertine values to the creation of the new service. Anderson and DeWolfe took a kitchen-sink approach. If something had proven popular on the Web, the commercially minded pair wanted it in MySpace. When their service launched on August 15, 2003, only six months after Friendster and three months after Tribe.net, it included games, a horoscope, and blogging along with a Friendster-like profile page for members.
While Friendster’s Abrams was a bit of a control freak, fighting a lengthy losing battle to protect his particular vision of a real identity-based service, MySpace took a generally lax approach to just about everything. That suited members just fine. For one thing, it was less rigid about who could join than other social networks. You didn’t need an invitation from an existing member. You could use either a real name or a pseudonym. And one of the features members liked best was not even intentional. An initial programming error allowed members to download Web software code—called HTML—onto their profiles. People quickly began using it to tart up their sites. Ever adaptive, the MySpace founders noted members’ enthusiasm for this freedom and embraced the error as an asset.
Member-created designs were how MySpace got its distinctive Times Square look—all flashing graphics and ribald images. But while this look might have been unintentional, it was in keeping with the MySpace ethos—if you could pretend to be anybody, you also had the freedom to make your profile look like anything. And you didn’t even always know who a MySpace member was. That made it difficult to limit your connections to genuine friends. People began adding friends willy-nilly, the more the better. It became a competition—how many could you have? As for behavior on the site, along with plenty of conventional conversation there was a definite tilt toward the sexual. On Friendster the look of a profile was fixed for consistency and Abrams wanted you to use your real name for connecting to other real people. Such niceties were disregarded by MySpace’s Anderson and DeWolfe.
As Angwin carefully explains in Stealing MySpace, the canny founders had superb timing. The world was ready for a mass-market social network. The sixdegrees service came too soon—it lacked the right online environment in which to thrive. But that landscape had finally emerged. In 2003, Angwin notes, the percentage of Americans with broadband Internet access rose from 15 percent to 25 percent. Broadband not only meant faster viewing times, it also made uploading photos easier. Digital cameras were becoming common and affordable. Crucially, a wider variety of people were getting fast Net speeds. For the first time lots of families—including those with teenage girls—had broadband. Had Friendster not broken down under the strain of success, it might have appealed to this crowd, but MySpace nicely stepped into the void.
MySpace initially spread among the relatively hip Los Angeles friends of Anderson and DeWolfe. The founders marketed their service in clubs to both bands and audiences. Shortly afterward it became an essential promotional tool for bands in L.A. It didn’t take long before enterprising musicians all over the country began adopting MySpace. Along with the bands came the bands’ audience—teenagers.
MySpace was hip and a great site to find out about bands, but it also leaned toward the sexual. Holding MySpace parties in nightclubs around the country became another of the site’s promotional tools. The implicit message: MySpace was a digital club where wild behavior was welcome. A disenchanted Friendster user who called herself Tila Tequila joined MySpace, bringing her fan club with her. She was a buxom young Vietnamese model with a yen for attention. Her profile was full of pictures of her wearing very skimpy clothing.
Though the site’s minimum age was supposedly sixteen, plenty of younger kids created profiles claiming to be older. It wasn’t unusual for thirteen-year-old eighth-grade girls to post photos of themselves wearing only a bra. Parents groups at junior highs and high schools all over the country convened alarmed meetings about the dangers of social networking.
By the time Thefacebook launched in February 2004, the flamboyant MySpace had more than a million members and was quickly becoming the nation’s dominant social network. Thefacebook offered users limited functions, a stark-white profile page, and was limited to students at elite universities. The contrast in tone couldn’t have been greater.
The first social network explicitly intended for college students had begun at Stanford University in November 2001. It was probably also the first real social network ever launched in the United States. This little-known service, called Club Nexus, was designed by a Turkish doctoral student in computer science named Orkut Buyukkokten as a way for Stanford students to improve their social life. An undergraduate political science major named Tyler Ziemann managed the nontechnical parts of the project.
Club Nexus was revolutionary and had a raft of features—probably too many. It allowed members to create a profile using their real names, and then list their best on-campus friends, who were known as “buddies” in Club Nexus lingo. Buddies who were not already members then automatically received an email inviting them to join the service. Only students with a Stanford-issued email address could join, and that email authentification ensured that each person was who they said they were. You could chat, invite friends to events, post items in a classifieds section including personal ads, write bloglike columns, and use a sophisticated search function to find people with similar interests. Students used it to find study partners, running buddies, and dates. Buyukkokten himself once bragged that what made it different from any other website was “you can create really big parties.”
Within six weeks Club Nexus had 1,500 members at Stanford, whose student body totaled about 15,000. But after it reached about 2,500, usage leveled off. The service was just too complicated. Buyukkokten was a talented programmer who had loaded it with every interesting feature he could think of. But that made it difficult to use and diffused activity among many different features. You didn’t get the sense there were many others in there with you.
Once the two men got their degrees in 2002, they wanted to commercialize their venture. Recognizing that student use was tepid, they made what some might call a foolish decision, considering the subsequent successes of Facebook—they focused instead on alumni. They created a company called Affinity Engines, which began marketing a modified version of Club Nexus called InCircle to college alumni groups. Their first client was the Stanford Alumni Association. By 2005 its customers included alumni networks at thirty-five schools, including giants like the University of Michigan. But not long after Affinity Engines started, Orkut Buyukkokten left the company and went to Google.
A year or so after he joined Google, the entrepreneurial programmer approached Marissa Mayer, a top company product executive, and told her that over the weekend he’d built the prototype for a new social network. Mayer and Google’s executives, who by policy encourage entrepreneurship among employees, embraced his project. Google was thinking of calling the project “Eden” or “Paradise.” Then one day Adam Smith, a product manager working with Buyukkokten, told Mayer that the engineer owned the Web address Orkut.com. The two felt Buyukkokten embodied the spirit of hi
s service, so they just decided to name it after him.
The well-conceived Orkut, a social network open to anyone, launched in January 2004, just two weeks before Thefacebook.com. It initially thrived in the United States and was holding its own against a surging MySpace. But by the end of 2004 it had, somewhat oddly, been tightly embraced by Brazilians. A grassroots campaign there to win more members than Orkut had in the United States captured the imagination of young Brazilians. After they succeeded, the service acquired a distinctly Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking cast. Americans began to drop away. Today Orkut, still owned by Google, remains one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated social networks, yet more than half its membership is Brazilian. Another 20 percent live in India.Google’s diminished expectations for it can perhaps be gleaned from the fact that in 2008 it moved Orkut’s headquarters to Brazil.
Club Nexus was the first college-specific social network, but by the 2003–2004 school year similar sites were popping up at a number of schools. The Daily Jolt, a sort of discussion community, had been around since 1999 as a kind of campus bulletin board and was operating at twelve schools. Collegester.com—“a virtual community of free, useful, and enjoyable services ‘for the students, by the students’”—had been launched in August 2003 by two University of California at Irvine alumni. An online matchmaking service called WesMatch was thriving at Wesleyan University. Its entrepreneurial founders had launched a version at Williams College and were expanding to Bowdoin, Colby, and Oberlin. At Yale, the student-run College Council launched a dating website called YaleStation on February 12—only a week after Thefacebook’s debut. By the end of the month about two-thirds of undergraduates had registered. Then there was CUCommunity, which had taken off at Columbia in January. Both the Yale and Columbia sites were getting lots of members before Thefacebook arrived.
The Facebook Effect Page 9
