The Connector Website Model New Implications for Social ... - PRWeb

mutual interest in a short amount of time. Because of this creative mixture of social
search and social networking applications, Friendster at one time publicized having more
than 20 million people in its online community, and after only three years of service. In
an effort to broaden its appeal, Friendster now offers blogging, interactive classifieds, and
bookmark sharing capabilities. 36
After an initial splash of success, Friendster began having a number of nagging
problems. The connector website has earned the unwanted reputation for technical
miscalculations and poor customer service. The website’s infrastructure was not ready
for its early surging user growth rates. People complained about major lag times between
making profile edits and those edits being officially posted on the website. Another
problem has been Friendster’s lack of brand or theme. It has been like a food court, a
purely functional place that tries to offer many different things to many different people.
Demographics is the most defining character of the website – urban twenty-somethings,
who are by and large looking for dates or racing each other to create the largest friend
network, but this is at best passive branding – Friendster is not actively targeting this
group of users. 37 The question is whether functionality is enough to win user loyalty.
My estimation is no. Eventually some other kind of feature or theme is probably
necessary to separate Friendster from other connectors as social exchange applications
are incorporated and mixed together by competitors. Friendster accomplished two
necessary ingredients for success – early entry into a new industry and offering a new and
innovative service – but now the website is trying to gain the competitive advantage for
longer term sustainability.
14