Someone is trying to rebuild Friendster | Hacker News Reader

Someone is trying to rebuild Friendster

friendster.com

62 pointsnavneetsingh51 comments

Back in Friendster's hey day, it had the notable "feature" of letting you see who's viewed your profile. Maybe Myspace had something similar, but this seemed thoroughly baked into the UX. I learned later that you could disable "exposing" yourself, at the cost of not seeing who's viewed your own profile.

After a long browsing sesh of flipping through friends and friends of friends profiles, I received a message from a girl who jokingly called me out via DM for viewing her profile and I responded in kind. We've been happily married 13 years now :)

Facebook's "people you may know" seems to always suggest people who have viewed your profile imo. For actual facebook and for IG.

What a nice story.

Odnoklassniki (classmates), second of the two most-popular Russian social media sites, also has always had this feature. That, and it primarily being used by older generations, are its defining features. You could hide yourself from other people's "profile guests" by paying to show up as anonymous.

This is a beautiful story, thank you for sharing! But also, I am so torn here.

On one hand, I want to say, it's worth making features like this even it sounds annoying to a lot of vocal people, because hey, maybe nudging people to connect more leads to some people connecting more and that was worth it!

On the other hand, maybe this is more a story of humans finding connection in spite of annoying UX, not necessarily because of it. These adventurous folks who were willing to connect on a DM on a whim online likely would have taken similar steps through mediums and find love (not necessarily each other)

LinkedIn had this feature, not sure if they still do.

Sort of.

They’re in the Tinder track of “X people seem interested in you, buy premium to see who they are!”

I tried it and almost all the people who had visited my profile where still hidden.

That's because they are premium members too and chose not to tell you who they were.

You need the Premium Deluxe Voyeur membership tier for that, which necessitates the Premium Confidential Partner membership tier to counteract.

It's Premiums all the way down!

They do. If there are stories of recruiters getting married to engineers who viewed their profile, I would love to hear them.

I've joked that LinkedIn is like a reverse dating site: Instead of attractive women dealing with loads of men whose messages they're uninterested in, it's men dealing with loads of attractive women whose messages they're uninterested in. :D

OkCupid also had this feature (back when they didn’t suck).

Whenever someone says "ops doesn't matter" I'm reminded of Friendster's huge early-advantage lead that was squandered because they couldn't keep the site up for more than six hours a day.

It wasn't just ops though, it was also their product strategy, algorithms, and scaling approach. One of the features of Friendster was that when you viewed someone's profile, it would show you all of the ways you were connected to that person, out to I think four degrees. I'm not sure how they did this, but it didn't scale, and the result was that in I believe late 2003, you'd see everyone in a coffee shop with their laptops out waiting for a friendster page to load. It would take over ten minutes to load a page sometimes.

The next year, MySpace started getting popular. MySpace didn't do all of this complicated social graph calculation at all. It would just tell you if you were friends or not. Naturally it was way faster, and despite other advantages of Friendster, it didn't take 10 minutes to load a page, and it took over completely until Facebook.

I’ve never heard anyone say “ops doesn’t matter”

I think it's usually implicitly communicated whenever there's a decision point to choose between allocating resources to ops or, for example, delivering a new feature. The new feature usually always wins.

Surely it must be easier this time to build something like Facebook today right?

Are you talking about building a Facebook clone of just the website and API? Yeah, probably relatively easy. If you're talking about data warehousing, research, and building/tweaking their algorithms, no that's still hard.

I can't imagine it wouldn't be easier to build something like early FaceBook today. There was no GCP / AWS / Azure / whatever back then. We were still racking servers, and we liked it.

> I can't imagine it wouldn't be

Whenever you have a double negative, flip both:

"I can imagine it would be"

If that changes the meaning too much, you can say:

"I can imagine it might be"

> > I can't imagine it wouldn't be

> I can imagine it would be

No. That means something completely different. They're saying (probably hyperbolically) that they cannot imagine the first of two possible situations, not that they can imagine the second.

Oh don't worry, I understand that just fine.

It's the speaker's or writer's task to iterate for a half second to find whatever non double negative sentence fits what they want to say.

English isn't code. You can't say double negatives in conversation or writing, and you have to find the closest thing without using a double negative.

> You can't say double negatives

It is in fact not the case that you can't say that. Double negatives, like sentences with a excessive number of conjuctions, are perfectly grammatical (when they don't violate some actual grammatical rule like the one "You do can say that." does); rather, they are in most cases stylistically bad, for much the same reasons that:

  stop = 0
  while(a() && !stop):
    b()
    if(!(c==d || !e())) stop = 1
    // should be `if(c!=d && e()) break`
    if(!stop) e()

is stylistically bad, namely excessive and more importantly needless complexity.

Thanks, we agree.

Oh. ... Okay, then. In that case I regret to inform you that your previous comment was extremely poorly phrased, to the point of seeming to mean almost the opposite of what you apparently intended. (Particularly in that double negatives are fine in conversation or writing, and can in fact be used, wherever they actually make sense - which is relatively rare in general, but occurs in the case we were originally discussing, since "can imagine it would be" means something different.)

Wow, you aren't not really tiring /s

Use double negatives less.

The end.

If you consider cost associated as an added difficulty, it’s possibly even more difficult now.

What has gone up in cost? The methods available 20 years ago are still available now.

We just have additional options now, which are actually cheaper to start, as you can get a lot of usage out of AWS' free tier.

Sure, once you get to "scale up" it's probably cheaper to do everything on-prem still, but that story is much better too with things like Golang, Docker, Elixir, k8s, etc, etc to make managing/building web-scale infrastructure much easier.

There were 1 billion people on the internet in 2005. Now there are more than 5 billion people on the internet.

There were no smartphones in 2005 and everyone used the web to access "social media". Now any social media is nonviable unless it has an app for both of the smartphone platforms.

Youtube and streaming video didn't exist in 2005. Now it's table stakes for social media to allow people to share videos.

The bar has been raised by at least an order of magnitude. Sure, it might be easier and/or cheaper now to do what Facebook did...in 2005. But that won't get you anywhere in 2023.

There are no more vc funds (currently) to pay your cloud bill though.

Did you add the words "generative AI" to your pitch?

The application? Sure. Most of the functionality could be hacked out in a "weekend" with a framework like Rails or Laravel.

The network? Not really. As a matter of fact, I don't think a new perfect FB would even be used today; people are only there because the people they want to reach already are. People today want a faster social experience (a la TikTok)

>The network? Not really. As a matter of fact, I don't think a new perfect FB would even be used today; people are only there because the people they want to reach already are.

Good example for this is Threads. Everybody I know and care to follow are still on Twitter. Threads was cool the first week or so but after that Twitter was too strong of a magnet.

I don't know how a new network gets built these days simply because the major ones that exist are already so engrained.

Politics and whatnot of Twitter aside, of course.

Special interest networks still have a big advantage over the giant general ones.

easier != easy

Looks like the HTML was directly lifted from some of the earliest versions of the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030407170314/http://www.friend...

(if the use of table tags for layout wasn't an obvious clue)

The waitlist widget is the only thing that's new.

Yep, and served via cloudfront from S3 (?). They literally just used a UI from 2003 and then had it redirect to a modern service when you click the button :D

No contact or privacy statement, yet they collect email addresses. Anyone know who is behind this?

The domain registration seems privacy proxied.

In case you didn't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster

Where did all the data go?

I'm still bummed all the data was lost from MySpace. I keep hoping a backup will be found on a random hard-drive somewhere.

Legend has it that MySpace's purple Comic Sans blinking marquee font, animated star glitter, and ActiveX malware can be heard off in the distance at night on the internet. It's what happens when you give under-filtered HTML and CSS access to users of a social media site that's essentially a CMS.

It was beautiful and the last time the internet wanted you to be creative and special

My eyes are still bleeding from the mouse cursor turned into a magic wand and animated deer with tramp stamps stomping all over the screen.

Perhaps MySpace's freedom inspired the stuffy boringness of FB.

When I hear that site's name, I am always immediately reminded of Nemester: https://zapatopi.net/nemester/

Anyone remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com?

Nobody else seems to remember Six Degrees. That was the OG.

That would be hilarious. It was sold and revamped as a social network in Asia, but I assume worldwide IP rights went with it. I seem to doubt that it could or would be "rebuilt" unless IP rights were retained or conferred legally.

Great thread necro revival

Rest assured this will be acquired by Meta before you can blink if it poses any amount of threat.

From a few years back, MySpace too: https://spacehey.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com