Friendster
The social network you joined before you even knew what a social network was. Millions made their first-ever online "profile" on Friendster — then MySpace came along, and the site that started it all became the cautionary tale.
Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in 2002, and within months of launch 3 million users had joined to make a profile and count their "friends" — for many of them, the first time they'd ever put their name and photo online and called it normal. In 2003, Google offered $30 million to buy the site and was turned down, a decision later remembered as one of the biggest blunders in Silicon Valley.
Friendster was the top social network until around April 2004, when MySpace overtook it in page views, and its dominance in the West evaporated from there. The site found a genuine second life in Southeast Asia — by 2008 it had more than 115 million registered users, with over 90% of its traffic coming from Asia — but in June 2011 it gave up the social-network fight entirely and repositioned itself as a social gaming site. The site shut down in June 2015.
Its legacy is specific: Friendster proved people would build public identities online and connect them to their real friends — then watched newcomers perfect the formula it pioneered. It came first, and it blinked.
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