Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

No ads, no algorithm, and you actually have to physically tap phones to add a friend

It's been more than a decade since social media platform Friendster went dark, but a new owner has brought it back from the dead - sort of - with the hope he can give exhausted users of modern platforms a reprieve. 

Philadelphia-based computer programmer Mike Carson said in a blog post on Monday that he bought the Friendster domain and later secured the brand's trademarks last year, and now has an iOS app available for aging internet denizens who want to return to Friendster, or those who wish to join anew. 

Carson has made a career out of starting solo SaaS operations, like domain name backordering site Park.io, as well as playing the domain name market, and his acquisition of Friendster happened because of his connection to that industry. He explains in his blog post that he noticed Friendster.com began resolving again in October 2023 after eight years offline, and quickly identified the owner through WHOIS records and his Park.io connections.

"I was curious who owned it, so I looked at the WHOIS info and recognized the owner as a customer of Park.io … and that I had corresponded with him previously over email," Carson said. It turns out the buyer paid less than $8,000 for the Friendster domain and was now simply using it to serve ads. 

"We worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com," Carson added. 

It's worth pointing out at this point that, at its peak, Friendster had more than 115 million registered users, most of whom were located in the Asia-Pacific region after successive platforms (e.g., MySpace and Facebook) displaced it in the US. Malaysian payments provider MOL Global bought Friendster in 2009 in a deal reportedly valued at $26.4 million, as the social network increasingly focused on Asia-Pacific users.

$26.4 million isn't a lot in big tech bucks nowadays, nor was it in 2009 when Facebook was valued at $10 billion. Either way, $20,000 in bitcoin and a domain that makes a pittance in annual recurring ad revenue is a far cry from Friendster's peak. 

Neo-Friendster: Where friends are your actual friends

"Today I feel that social networks foster a lot of negativity, but I remembered Friendster as being a really positive and enjoyable experience," Carson writes, rose-colored glasses on the early internet notwithstanding. "I wanted to create something positive — something that people would enjoy and find useful."

That, he noted, took the form of a platform that wouldn't sell data to advertisers, didn't have an algorithm or ads - basically a back-to-basics version of the early days of social media, hopefully for longer than it's taken other companies to replace user-focused development with maximum profit seeking. 

Carson's initial attempt to relaunch the site by inviting people from a waitlist met with limited success, however, with those features proving "nice but [not] enough of a draw." 

Turning to Hacker News for advice, Carson decided to take one user's advice to make it impossible to connect with users, and thus add them to one's friend list, without physically touching phones together, à la NFC, AirDrop, etc.

"The idea that the only way to connect as friends on Friendster is by tapping phones was fun because it would promote people meeting in person," Carson said. "It would also verify that you are connecting to real people, and people that you actually want to connect with."

As it stands now, anyone can sign up for a Neo-Friendster account, but be prepared to have an empty feed unless you want to actually go out and engage with other users. There's no web version, and it's only available on iOS for now. Carson told The Register in an email that he's working on an Android version and plans to restore the web version soon, as it was only temporarily taken down for app integration work.

As for why he's doing this, Carson said in his blog post, and reiterated to us in his email, that his motivation to build a new, IRL-focused version of Friendster comes from his love of early social media platforms, in particular OkCupid, where he met his wife. 

"Websites like that genuinely change the course of people's lives — people meet, fall in love, build families. That's incredible to me," Carson said. "If Friendster helps even a few people find that kind of connection, it will have been worth it."

If it's at all successful, Carson's Friendster may quickly run into the need to spend a lot of cash to prop up a platform without any advertisements or services that'd attract companies willing to spend money. He wrote that he doesn't particularly care about making money off of Friendster, only hoping that it will eventually pay for itself. 

"I'll probably offer a paid plan for premium features down the road — but that's a problem for later," Carson noted. Those premium features could include things like vanity usernames, @friendster.com email addresses, and other ideas he told us he's still tossing around.

"I'm still thinking over the best way to go forward with this," Carson told us.

Whatever he chooses, Carson has his work cut out for him. He'll actually need to make people care about a relaunched social media platform that only aging internet users remember, for one, and to use a platform that would actually force people to get out of their internet bubble to try something new. Like getting together with friends in person. 

In other words, people will have to get off their butts to make this platform useful, and that might be a hard sell. ®