I saw this story on one of my few searches using scribd. I find this very informative especially to start-up tech’s or to whatever investment you are into right now. Enjoy your read..
How to Kill a Great Idea!
Net media darling Friendster should have become a billion-dollar company. What
happened? Founder Jonathan Abrams who invented social networking tells us all.
By: Max Chafkin, Inc.com, Published June 2007
“Meanwhile, scant attention was paid to Friendster's users. Lunt remembers marveling
sometime in early 2004 at how Friendster's traffic would mysteriously spike at 2 a.m.
Intrigued, he started looking at the site's log. Oh, my God, he thought, everyone is from
the Philippines . He worked backwards, looking for "patient zero"--the first American to
"Friendster" a Filipino. He found Carmen Leilani De Jesus, a 32-year-old marketing
consultant and part-time hypnotherapist from San Francisco , the 91st person to join
Friendster. She was directly connected to Abrams as well as to dozens of Filipinos, who'd
in turn connected to thousands more. In fact, more than half the site's traffic was coming
from Southeast Asia .
From a business standpoint, the revelation was devastating. Friendster, it turned out, was
paying millions of dollars a year to attract eyeballs that were effectively worthless to its
advertisers. Says Abrams: "We needed to make a tough decision"--either spin off the
Asian business or become the No. 1 Filipino social network. But because the Filipino
users had come by way of their American friends, there was no easy answer. If Friendster
cut the cord to Asia --either by drastically cutting back on engineering resources or by
kicking the Asian users off the site altogether--it risked damaging its American user base.
The Carmens of the world might look for a less restrictive site.”
Read the complete article here..
http://www.careerclub.com.ph
Job searching will never be the same again..