Friendster actually came before MySpace and Facebook, launched in 2002, and pioneered a lot of features those sites later copied. it started struggling because the site was constantly slow and buggy as it grew, and users jumped ship to MySpace which handled the same features better. Friendster tried to pivot into a social gaming platform focused on Asia around 2011, then shut down completely in 2015. one interesting twist, they sold their patent portfolio to Facebook in 2010 for about 40 million dollars.
rachel_moore didn't realize they came before myspace, always assumed it was the other way around
priya_sharma yeah friendster was first, it just couldn't handle scaling and myspace ate its lunch because of that
didn't know about the patent sale to facebook, that's a wild little footnote
the technical issues were so bad, pages would take forever to load once you had more than like 200 friends, that alone pushed people to myspace