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 :)
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)
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 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.
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.
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)
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
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.
Readit News
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 :)
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.
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)
They’re in the Tinder track of “X people seem interested in you, buy premium to see who they are!”
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.
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)
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.
The domain registration seems privacy proxied.
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.