Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000094 · Internet History → Dead platforms → Social networking sites · 2003–2015
Friendster
Social network that beat Facebook in Asia before vanishing
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“It turned down $30 million from Google in 2003. Facebook later paid $40 million just for its patents.”
Why Noah kept it
Friendster launched in 2003, hit 3 million users in months, turned down $30 million from Google, then lost the US to MySpace and carried on in Southeast Asia until 2015. The Ark has GeoCities and AIM but no early social network yet, and this was one of the first.
- In the Ark since
- 26 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.4 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 30.8 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster
What it is
Friendster was a social networking site launched in 2003 where you connected with friends, shared photos and videos, and discovered music and events. It dominated Asia from 2008 onwards, reaching 115 million users mainly in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, before shutting down in 2015 after pivoting to gaming.
Why it’s internet culture
Friendster shows how the early internet's geography wasn't uniform: a platform could be massive in one region while barely existing in another, and still lose to a global competitor. It also demonstrates how quickly social networks burned through user attention and how a platform's death could be total and permanent until money revived it years later as something unrelated.
Friendster is where millions of people first built a public list of their friends online. Americans left it for MySpace within a year, while users in the Philippines and Indonesia kept it going until 2015.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2003 · Friendster.com, a website run from Mountain View, California · Also known as Friendster.com
- What it is
- Friendster was a website where you made a page about yourself, called a profile, with a photo, your interests and a list of people you knew. Other members could ask to be on your list, and once they were, you could see their friends and their friends' friends. People used it to find dates, old classmates and new people with the same taste in bands. It was one of the first sites of this kind to reach millions of people.
- Where it came from
- Jonathan Abrams, a Canadian programmer, built it in 2002 and opened it to the public in March 2003. The name mixed "friend" with Napster, a music file sharing service everyone had heard of. It spread by invitation: you joined because a friend asked you to. It reportedly had 3 million users by autumn 2003. Google offered about $30 million for it that year and was turned down. In the US, slow pages and a fight with users over fake profiles helped push people to MySpace by 2004, while it kept growing in Southeast Asia.
- Why it mattered
- Friendster was where a lot of people first put a public list of their friends online and let strangers look at it. Most of the habits that later sites like MySpace and Facebook were built on started here: profiles, friend requests, counting friends, writing on each other's pages. Its fall mattered too. It was the first big example of a site losing everyone to a rival within a year, and the turned down Google offer became a standard story about missed chances. Facebook later bought its patents.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People went online to show off who they knew as much as to talk to them. When the site wouldn't let them play with it, through fake profiles or slow pages, they moved somewhere that would, and took their friends with them.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (1.8 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.3 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (10.6 KB)
- Original
- 30.8 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.4 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.1 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.3 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 40.3% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,358 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 1,874 |
History
Kept
“Friendster launched in 2003, hit 3 million users in months, turned down $30 million from Google, then lost the US to MySpace and carried on in Southeast Asia until 2015. The Ark has GeoCities and AIM but no early social network yet, and this was one of the first.”