"When it launched, the service was powered by a Java back end running on Apache Tomcat servers with a MySQL database."
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2668567/friendster-scales-...
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2668567/friendster-scales-...
> He had also experimented with PHP, a language similar to Perl but optimized for Web development. Coming from a 2005 context I enjoyed the need to explain what PHP was .
It's not mentioned explicitly but I recently read, and I _think_ this was wrt Friendster, that one of the reasons FaceBook was able to establish a position when other social networks were already going strong was that (I think) Friendster built a graph of the status of all 'friends' for every page load and so as the userbase grew this became a very arduous thing to do. FaceBook didn't do that and so had snappier ui. Sorry can't remember where I read that so no cite.