Interesting Article on the demise of Friendster

A friend of mine sent me a fairly well-written article on the demise of Friendster - which at one time was the top social networking website on the internet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/80907/How-to-Kill-a-Great-Idea

The article does a nice job at making the story sound extraordinary. Which is fine, as I'm sure founding Friendster really was an awesome rollercoaster experience. It really was the first big internet hit after the dotcom bust, and it also faded relatively quickly.

However, I will claim that there was nothing extraordinary about the management failures and the loss of users. I would rate a number of managers/execs I have observed as making relatively good decisions, and others as making relatively bad decisions. However, the vast majority of them (> 90%?) seem to embrace the idea that they are "The Decider". I have actually had people tell me, "you are probably right, but I'm the boss and we're doing it my way even if it won't work". I think the #1 tempation of management is to think of it as yourself as a technical expert, best suited for making ALL decisions under you (and even above?) and that the only reason to delegate is that it's too much work for one person to do.

But that isn't really what leadership is about. Leadership really is a different skill than "doing". Something I read a long time ago, explained a good leader as having 3 fundamental characteristics:

• Vision
• Resolve
• Humility

There's nothing in there about brilliant engineering or decision making ability. A leader needs to set specific goals (things like "have more subscribers than myspace" or "implement a solution that meets these requirements on schedule"). Then you can't change your mind randomly, but instead need to have the conviction, resolve, and consistency that it is an achievable goal and the business unit will continue on the path towards that goal until it's achieved. Finally, there is the humility. Initially I had a hard time understanding the part of humility, but after letting it mill around in my head for a number of years, I now believe that humility is the most important of the three:

• Humility is required to admit when you are wrong and correct course - the vast majority of managers I've worked with work under a model where they attempt to never admit they are wrong. But it's really an important skill to recognize early when you are wrong, and how to fix the problem - and the possibilty of undoing should be considered as well.
• Humility is required to listen to underlings, peers, and even superiors suggestions and actually evaluate whether they are good ideas or not - and weigh them objectively against your own. Or even to give people a shot at implementing ideas you initially disagree with and objectively evaluating the results.
• Humility is required to understand that the leader doesn't actually do all the work. Delegation isn't a mechanism for multiplying an excellent worker by their number of subordinates. In order to be most effective, the people actually performing a task, should have input into how that task is accomplished and ownership of the task itself.

The type of leadership that killed Friendster (the same style as the overwhelming majority of business leaders out there) is obviously flawed. The leadership team didn't present a consistent vision, provide conviction that the vision was achievable, and they definitely didn't have any humility or allow technical experts within the organization to do their job. From that perspective, I do agree with Johnathan Abrams that failure was inevitable immediately after the $13 million funding round.

So has he learned a valuable lesson from Friendster and we can expect Socializer to be wildly successful? I wasn't convinced of this from the article. I am sure he learned tons, but (from the article) it didn't sound like humility was one of those lessons.

What is the #1 lesson from Friendster?

Of course, I have the humility to acknowledge this is only my opinion =). However, it is not based on reading the article, but rather from my exerience as an involved Friendster user from very early on, someone who met a girlfriend I dated for more than 3 years on the site, and an interested observer of the sites evolution and it's competition with MySpace.

The Tipping Point from Friendster to MySpace was very quick - I would say the key period was less than 3 months. And from the user perspective it was super easy to explain, predict, etc.

• The site was extremely slow almost from the beginning - this in itself was largely tolerated by the user base - to a point. Although I'm sure, if asked, many MySpace converts would have rated the speed as their top complaint. Sometimes it was ridiculously slow or wouldn't come up at all; however, during the 3 month period when they lost their lead in the US market, I would have to rate the page load speed as acceptable.
• Friendster took a restrictive approach to user profile content, at times blocking customizations as simple as changing the background of a user's profile. MySpace on the other hand allowed almost any technically feasible customization, and spawned hundreds of external site/theme generators which allow users to fully customize their profiles to be extremely unique. (these sites are so widely used that many of them are successful businesses - ex, 17 year old millionaire Ashley Qualls' whateverlife.com). User's have strong bonding feelings with this type of profile customization, and that was probably the biggest reason for the Early Adopters switch from Friendster to MySpace.
• Finally, Friendster quickly lost the elusive cool factor in a largely unfought battle with MySpace. MySpace created a more lively, more hip atmosphere. One of my friends described it way back then as almost like walking through a club where each persons profile is like a new room in the club, they have their favorite music playing, the room is decorated with all kinds of fun pictures and their top friends are featured prominently. Friendster did not capture this experience. MySpace also threw parties at trendy locations in cities around the country (I tried to get into one in LA - at a time when Friendster was still the leading site - and was one of thousands who didn't make it inside). On top of that, they promoted bands, got celebrities to create profiles on the site, etc. They consciously devoted lots of effort into making the site cool and tieing it into existing popular culture, while Friendster did not.

How can a fix for all these problems be summed up in a single lesson? Actually, very easily, and I feel it's the #1 key lesson for ALL online (and many offline) businesses with large numbers of users. This lesson is to listen to the users. It's almost too simple (and therefore almost always overlooked by "decider" style managers who don't have much humility). Anyone in a position to serve more customers than they can talk to in a single day, really should read the Cluetrain Manifesto - this is the #1 topic of the book. They do an excellent job of explaining why this is so important, and how our current online world enables companies to relate to their users in a way that was not nearly as possible before.

Friendster obviously did very little listening to their users. Instead of solving the user's compliants, or even focusing on positive user feedback they internally generated all their work. And unfortunately, I really do think this is the prevalent mode of business operations in the US right now. Hahaha - although it sounds like something out of the twilight zone in the article when it is mentioned, I have no difficultly envisioning the meeting of the execs when they are dismayed to learn that over half the users are from the Philippines (something I'm positive I knew before that meeting occurred - through anecdotal data), and they consider the idea of blocking Filipinos from using the site! ROTFL! It's disgraceful, but once again, super common... Even the site which the Friendster article is on (Scribd.com) has a fatal flaw for article content - their flash based reader is a much worse reading experience than reading a typical web page. I've worked at a company whose first assumption about their customers is that they are too stupid to use a competitor's "superior" product. If that isn't a backwards vision, I don't know what is.