This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam.

So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open each message and discover it is spam.

The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.