I’m getting tired of hearing how great Friendster is. Like the usual Silicon-valley startup, they ejected the original management and brought in so-called superstars to take over the reigns. Now these greybeards are leaving in droves. The Frienster-killer is supposedly MySpace. I’m not as huge a fan of MySpace as people like Mike Jones, but that’s because he’s selling them something. I think MySpace is great for the 20-something set but once you hit 30 the look and feel, user experience and demographic just don’t do it for me. They’ll raise some cash and make money selling ad space to the indie music labels (MySpace now hosts sites for 110,000 musicians, and the rock group R.E.M. is among the bands that have used the site to pre-release new albums.)
I’m amazed Frienster had so many problems with scalability and infrastructure. Haven’t we figured this stuff out already? Three CEO’s, three strategies, no wonder. Supposedly Frienster will announce a partnership in February. Will it be as off-the-mark as the deal with eHarmony?
Snip from the NYT article. If you don’t have a login go to Bugmenot to get one :
Friendster can boast more registered users – 16 million – than the 7.6 million who have registered at MySpace. But data provided by Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore MediaMetrix, two firms that measure domestic Internet traffic, tell a different story.
More than five times as many people visited MySpace as Friendster in December, according to Nielsen/NetRatings – and they spent far more time there. The average visit to Friendster was less than 17 minutes, the rating service found, compared to 78 minutes at MySpace. And MySpace logged more than 2 billion page views last month, according to MediaMetrix, compared to 152 million page views at Friendster.
Now that the online dating industry is finally starting to understand the link between social networking and dating, the next few months should be interesting.
