[stickfigure]

Downvotes? Wow, that's unnecessarily harsh.

Two close friends of mine were the #2 and #4 employees of Friendster. I seriously considered becoming #3. I had a pretty good outsider's view of the early years.

Yeah, they screwed up the scaling pretty badly. But even worse they screwed up the business - after you set up your profile and looked around, there wasn't much more to do (unless you were single and looking). People were already using Friendster as an identity (emailing links as a "you mean this person, right?"). Maybe if they'd opened an API and enabled third-party apps, they could have maintained this position. It's a big "what if" but it can't be dismissed outright.