I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

gnabgib

Related: Friendster Relaunch (28 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883307 Ask HN: How to make Friendster great? (98 points, 11 months ago, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053119

mmclar

Can you please make it (and keep it) so that friendships are symmetrical? I.e., "friend" rather than "follow". IMO that's the enshittification inflection point of Facebook.

lwhi

Why no android app?

addedGone

We can't seem to be able to login from the website, it requires an Apple account? The UI might not be showing up properly.

hateful

The only thing I liked when I did use Facebook was the "wall". To be able to post on a friend's wall semi- publically where their friends can see it. Most other Facebook clones have had the idea of tagging, but it wasn't the same. (E.g. Google+)

philipnee

thanks for bringing it back!

mjamesaustin

This looks exactly like what I've been looking for. I love the idea of using phone proximity as the only way to add friends. I think it will be very important for the onboarding process to be effortless, so you should focus on that. Until you reach some kind of saturation, most people will be downloading the app because a friend wants to add them. Having a way to generate a QR download code on my phone when I "add" a friend so they can take a photo and then download it, and immediately connect us, would be huge. Do you have any kind of development plan for new features?

deadbabe

Could you make it so you can have group chats but you can invite anyone you’ve tapped before and they can all talk together (but still not be able to talk outside the group chat)

saghm

> He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin. > So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com. I don't know anything about how to project future ad revenue of a domain, but would this be likely to be valued at only $10,000? Unless I'm misremembering my limits, even if it made $4,500 next year and continued to cut in half every year after that, it would still account for $9,000 of revenue projecting indefinitely into the future, even bumping that up to something like 60% of the previous year's revenue it would already put it at more than $10,000 (although I don't know whether ad revenue tends to scale with inflation or not; my instinct is that the prices of ads probably would roughly increase with inflation over time)? I know I'm nitpicking a bit about the title, but I can't help but actually be curious now that I thought of this.

dnnddidiej

Nice. Quick hypoyhetical. Meta offers $1bn in 5 years time when you have 2m users. Will you sell? If so this is a meta-or-dead social network. Making it federated etc. would make me trust it more.

readitalready

I really wish more social networks would have a "fading connections" limit. So many social networks suffer from stale connections and networks, and these connections should expire after a year. Otherwise, it will permanently define a social network's content and editorial direction without algorithmic control. For example, Selena Gomez will always have 400million followers on Instagram, but she's socially irrelevant now. Same with other celebrities, like Kim Kardashian. If connections expired after a year (or 3 months or 6 months), people would have to maintain their social relevance, and it becomes a natural editorial filter, keeping the overall network fresh and relevant. If you want a business model, require payment for long-term subscriptions or large celebrity/news accounts, but you have to overcome the network effect first. Maybe have a dozen or so permanent connections to start with, like MySpace's 8 priority friends.

skybrian

I'm imagining one of those tiny libraries with a garden gnome in it with a cheap phone inside, connected to a garden gnome Friendster account. And then it gets stolen and has a trip around the world, meeting new people.

kgwxd

Bought Friendster, posted about it on Medium. Can't wait for the Justin.tv live stream!

breezywheezy

He gave the guy $20k dollars in bitcoin (I can’t say how much bitcoin that is because it fluctuates too much to be a stable currency), to buy a dead domain that makes $9k a year in at revenue. What an absolute garbage economy.

sikozu

This is crazy, but unfortunately I don't have an iPhone otherwise I'd totally sign up.

trueno

i bought friendster for 30k, heres what it taught me about b2b sales

yieldcrv

on the fading connection and monetization - you could let people pay to re-up the connection from fading as opposed to meeting in person again first, and its makes them really think about whether meeting in person is worth happening again or would ever happen again, is the connection itself valuable in another way any way on instagram, there is a social disincentive to unfollow people and you can also make someone else unfollow you in a couple ways (the button that does just that, as well as blocking someone for a second and unblocking them), doing these actions has a real cost to confrontation. people you thought you would never see again will see you again and say "I thought we were following each other???? oooo :O ... ooooh >:O" you are making that activity a first class citizen, with no presumption of ill will behind it, this has value to it

bluebarbet

>I don’t really care about making money from [$project], but I’d like it to eventually pay for itself. Warning bells. Slippery slopes. I think we should know by now that social networks do not mix well with the advertising business model. It would have been nice to see that eventuality ruled out explicitly here (PS: for the future as well as just for now) .

halamadrid

This is quite amazing. I remember being on the original friendster way back in the day. They had so much potential. And there was also orkut.com that was even better because of the simpler UX. Then came Facebook and you all know the rest.

QuantumNomad_

I tried to search for Friendster in the App Store and didn’t see it among the first few results. Instead, App Store was returning a sponsored ad followed by normal results for all other kinds of similar annd less similar apps. Instagram, Snapchat, Yubo (never heard of), Monopoly Go (mobile game related to the board game Monopoly), BeFriend (never heard of), Tinder, Friendly Social Browser (never heard of), Facebook, and at that point I stopped scrolling the results. For a moment I thought maybe the app was US exclusive or something and not available in my region. But following the link from the post worked fine and I could install it. I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird. Anyway, installed the app finally thanks to the link. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/friendster/id6760240416