Friendster
What Happened
Friendster launched in 2002, founded by Jonathan Abrams. It was the first mainstream social network — real identities, friend connections, profiles, and testimonials. By 2003 it had 3 million users and was the hottest product on the internet, beating MySpace and Facebook to market by more than a year.
Google offered to acquire Friendster in 2003 for $30M in stock. Abrams and the board turned it down. In hindsight, that stock would have been worth well over a billion dollars within a few years. It is routinely cited as one of the worst acquisition rejections in startup history.
Friendster couldn't handle its own growth. Page loads stretched to 40 seconds. Users fled to MySpace, and later Facebook. A 2006 redesign and repeated re-architectures came too late. The company pivoted to a social gaming site in 2011, focused on Southeast Asia, where it still had residual traction.
In June 2015, Friendster shut down completely. A pioneering product that had defined the social network category, rejected Google, and lost to faster-moving competitors officially closed its doors — a decade after its peak and five years after anyone in North America remembered it existed.
