The Friendster Autopsy: How a Social Network Dies

The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have "resilience and social influence," Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.

If there's a lesson to be learned from the data, it's that it takes more than a lot of users to build a viable social network. They need to have strong connections too. So Facebook should be looking at the types of connections it users have and encourage them to connect to other strongly connected users, Garcia says.

In other words, strong networks are made up of strongly-linked people, not of stragglers.

CAUSE OF FAILURE

Friendster seemed like a fun place to hang out, with all the right bells and whistles to lead the way, what went wrong, then?

Friendster did two things particularly well: it offered social gaming and it gave users reasons to keep coming back to its platform. What it seemed to have missed creating, instead, was an actual social network. If one had to point out a major point that made Facebook soar, and that Friendster and other similar sites didn’t catch up with, was the presence and the emphasis put on the social news feed feature.

Gaming is fun, but only until a certain point, while social interactions - of any kind, really - are always sought after by people. By making the news feed the central part of its platform, Facebook ensured that people always had new things to interact with that somehow was still connected to them or their circle of friends. It offered a never-ending stream of new posts and pictures to like or comment on and it shifted away from the previous focus which was to curate and polish one’s own profile, which was exactly still one of Friendster’s focus. User use and registration declined and the company struggled to regain influence and shut down.

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