Friendster is back, but it looks very different

Do you remember Friendster?

The social network of the early 2000s is now back almost 24 years later with a new gimmick: Users can only communicate with real friends.

The founder of the new Friendster, Mike Carson, is promoting the reinvented social network as free of ads and algorithms. But, that’s not all that’s missing either.

Friend is currently available as an iOS app. And when the user downloads the application and sets up his account, he will see a completely empty space. Friendster does not show users any posts. In fact, there are no suggestions about who to follow at all.

The new Friendster is designed for users to strictly follow people they know in real life. And the platform makes sure it’s used that way too. To follow someone on Friendster, the two users need to touch each other’s phones while the app is open. This is the only way to contact someone on the platform.

What happened to Friendster

Before MySpace took off, there was Friendster.

Friendster was officially launched in March 2002 by its founder Jonathan Abrams and is widely regarded as the first major online social networking site. However, soon after its launch, other social networking sites such as MySpace quickly took off and Friendster was unable to maintain a base with American users.

The platform gained a significant user base in Asia and was eventually sold to a Malaysian company, before Friendster became a social gaming website in 2011. However, in the end, Friendster was completely shut down in 2015.

Carson, the new owner, said be careful that the Friendster.com domain also solved this website filled with pop-up ads in 2023. Carson contacted the new owner of the domain and found out that they had won Friendster.com in an auction for an expired domain one year earlier for only $7,456. Carson eventually struck a deal with the domain owner, buying Friendster.com for $20,000 in Bitcoin and Carson’s other domain generating $9,000 a year.

In a blog post discussing his journey to find the Friendster site, Carson said he plans to enable a friends-of-friends feature, which would allow users to connect online only if they’re connected to another friend that one of the users has met.

In addition, Carson would like to release a Fading Connection feature that affects users when they are not in the same room as their Friendster connection for more than a year.

“It’s not a punishment – it’s a suggestion that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online,” Carson explained.

After downloading the app, I have to point out that all the blankness makes it difficult to use the app. However, the new Friendster seems like a very interesting idea – if it can take off. The real challenge seems to be getting users to start there, because they will also see an application with an empty space until they start making real life connections.