Friendster looks to be all the rage. Walk into any supermarket and you're likely to overhear milk stockers talking about it. It recently scored some big new venture capitalist funding. And its membership rolls are blooming.
But behind the fairy tale of an Internet success story is a disturbing trend.
Though it remains at the top of the online social networking heap, there are increasing rumblings that some of Friendster's earliest core users are unhappy with it. And now that they've found alternatives to the service, many are packing up and moving on.
The key issues behind the Friendster abandonment trend, according to users, are the service's inability to do anything about its habitual server lag problems, and its growing reputation for heavy-handed moral policies and unilateral decisions it makes on behalf of its members.
Friendster did not make anyone available for comment for this story.
"It was much fun once I was on (Friendster), friend-requesting everyone and amassing a surprising, to me, amount of testimonials," recalls Allison Lange of her early experiences with Friendster. "I loved logging in each day and seeing all my friends' shiny happy faces beaming up at me."
But Lange's own happy times with Friendster quickly faded.
"First of all, the service was always slow," she said. "Then, the 'Friendstapo' showed up and started killing fakesters" -- fake member personas that became popular on the service -- "auditing what photos people could use and censoring language. It all really disagreed with me on an ideological level, and because it made Friendster less fun."
Lange is not alone. Others talk of problems such as extreme difficulties getting the service to adhere to requests for membership cancellation.
"I tried to delete my profile on Friendster, but couldn't find any way to do that with their interface," says former member Kevin Gilmore. "I e-mailed their support to ask how I deleted my profile. I was told that they didn't do that (and that) if I didn't want to use the service ... I should just not log on. That was not good enough for me. So, I pushed them further. I told them I wanted my profile gone. They were rude. They were indignant. I threatened a lawsuit. My profile disappeared. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth."
Clearly, one of the problems Friendster is having is with its service and support teams. Its website lists a phone number to call with questions, but the voice message on that line refers all callers to departmental e-mail addresses.
There are some who feel that the service still suits their needs, especially when it comes to dating. That, of course, may be Friendster's strongest suit and what has so far kept it significantly ahead of competitors like Tribe.net.
"I haven't taken down my Friendster profile, nor am I likely to, for one simple reason," says a member who calls herself Mermaid. "Friendster actually does one thing better than Tribester, and yes, I call it that on purpose, and that thing is dating. Friendster is all about the hookup."
Heathen Michael Persephone, another Friendster devotee, agrees, and thinks Friendster does the best job of enabling her sex life.
"I like Friendster because it is more people-oriented," she says. "Tribe is more geared towards selling used blenders and looking for a job. I don't need to be reminded how many jobless people there are, or what awful things people will do for a buck.... What I want is the fantasy that we are all rock stars, that everyone's ass looks great in leather, that everyone is sexy."
Yet, despite the way Friendster succeeded so rapidly at helping people get a solid handle on what their networks of friends were like, it is likely going to have a hard time keeping those people happy unless it does a better job of listening to them and addressing their concerns.
One concern is that Friendster needs to lighten up and give its users what they want.
"Friendster ... lacked a sense of humor," says Lisa Pimental. "Many of us had created profiles for our pets, and we were having fun hooking up our dogs and cats. And Friendster came along and deleted those profiles."
Perhaps Friendster's biggest problem is that its list of competitors is growing, and that some of them, particularly Tribe, get much better performance reviews.
"Tribe.net shows all the polish of a team taking a good long look at Friendster, noting both its limitations and also what people on Friendster were trying to do," says Tribe fan Dennis Hescox. "Friendster seemed to have an opinion about how someone should use their system and blocking any other uses the community tried to use it for."
All of this is, of course, music to Mark Pincus' ears. Pincus, Tribe's CEO, is also an investor in Friendster, but he seems to realize that taking the moral high road on an online social networking tool is not the way to go.
"We don't want to make our network one that works well for one segment and turns off whole other segments," Pincus says. "I can't tell you we're never going to piss off some segment of our users. (But) we're trying to create enough sandboxes and segment enough so that people can express themselves and not be offensive to others."
The bottom line for Friendster may be that it misread the needs of those who have left for other services, like Tribe or Emode.
"The main issue with Friendster is that it treats every member as an individual, rather than tackling the much more complex issue of groups," says Katrina Glerum, who developed a social networking program for University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. "I think Tribe is better, because it starts with the assumption that people are parts of communities, rather than that people are all lone gunmen."
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