FRIENDSTER

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Here lies Friendster, launched in 2002 as the very first website to ask “what if your real-life friends, but a website?” It grew so fast that its servers caught fire — figuratively, then occasionally not — with pages routinely taking 20 to 40 seconds to load under the weight of its own popularity.

Investors came calling, including a famous offer from Google that Friendster turned down. The slowness never got fixed. Users, tired of waiting for their “temple” of a profile to render, drifted to a faster, glitterier upstart called MySpace, and never really came back.

Friendster spent its final years pivoting to a social gaming platform in Southeast Asia, a business nobody who remembered the original site had asked for. In 2015, the servers went dark for good, taking with them every photo, message, and testimonial of the social web’s very first generation. No export tool. No goodbye. Just pixels in a vast, unknown pond.

EOF