Yes they did, the founder of Lyft gave a speech at SXSW last year on the evolution of Zimride => Lyft. He said that "the focus of Lyft would continue to be and always has been reducing the number of empty seats on the road." (paraphrasing)

Speaking of early rideshare entrants, I'm at least a bit amused that Ridester(http://www.ridester.com) is currently being auctioned off on Flippa.

https://flippa.com/5863667-ridester-com

Don't think so.

I used Zimride when I was moving from Portland to Los Angeles, I picked up some random guy along the way and dropped him off in SFV. Great way to subsidize gas of the moving truck.

After that it seemed like ZimRide went for the University market instead of having total strangers effectively do e-hitchhiking.

Now it seems Enterprise Car Rental bought the company.