I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

Related: Friendster Relaunch (28 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883307

Ask HN: How to make Friendster great? (98 points, 11 months ago, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053119

Love it!!! Businesses that have genuine passion like these are the ones that really blow up…or die :-)

Probably being pedantic, but this is not buying Friendster to be precise, usually what is meant by that is that the company was bought.

In this case the domain Friendster.com was bought, and a trademark was conceded (a new different trademark), I don't know precisely the implications of the trademark though, I think it's a different trademark and you still cannot imply that you are a continuation of the previous trademark holder, it's just that you are given monopoly over that word as a trademark.

Now, is that different than buying "Friendster"? A really interesting legal question, I think it is, and I think it has relevant implications, I don't think you can for example restore the website as it was and pretend a continuation as you would if you bought the company.

Wow. Yes. Thank you!

Well, this sounds sketchy as hell. Pass.

> Friendster was the first social network

Friendster was not the first social network.

sixdegrees.com had it beat by 5 years.

app is snappy and solid. missing a “invite friends” link… i know the point is in person, i’m with two people in person but had to go back to app store to find a share link.

Good luck with this.

I run an iOS-only app that Serves a small, specific demographic (and is free. It does not generate any revenue). It’s been shipping for a bit over two years, and has just over 1,000 users. I seriously doubt it will ever get more than a couple of thousand (a rounding error, for most folks around here). I did test it with 12,000 users, so it should handle the anticipated load.

I am writing the 2.0 version, now. I think I’ll add the “tap to connect” feature, and probably QR codes, as well.

i bought friendster for 30k, heres what it taught me about b2b sales

Hi, congrats on the launch!

Firstly, it doesn’t seem to work for me and my wife - we hold the phones together but clicking start does nothing (and we’ve accepted Bluetooth etc).

Secondly, I wonder if you’ll have a massive chicken and egg issue with the physical feature. I get it’s the main feature but could you overcome it somehow initially while still maintaining your long term “gimmick”? Like could you allow people to connect with the first X friends (5? 10? 20? Whatever that can get virality and flywheel going) or connect with as many as you want virtually for the first X months etc. You could even have the contacts fade away slowly if they don’t get verified in person etc. You might want to model out different strategies (and be extremely conservative) otherwise you’ll be relying on lottery-level luck. Good luck anyway though :)

The plot of Anaconda 2025, but Friendster.

this is awesome. godspeed. or should i say friendspeed

>only way to make friends is actually make friends

Good luck to the app, but I'll never use this.

The overwhelming majority of people I know with whom I want to have long digital conversations with are also a minimum of 500 kilometers away from me.

Can you please make it (and keep it) so that friendships are symmetrical? I.e., "friend" rather than "follow". IMO that's the enshittification inflection point of Facebook.

> My wife and I met on OkCupid. I wouldn’t have my kids without it. Websites like that genuinely change the course of people’s lives — people meet, fall in love, build families. That’s incredible to me.

> If Friendster helps even a few people find that kind of connection, it will have been worth it.

Did you tap phones for OkCupid? The type of network you are building does not work that way -- you will not build the same types of connections in-person as you can online. I hope it goes well, but it's not the same type of thing.

thanks for bringing it back!

Do we actually need social networks?

These, to me, feel like artifacts of a bygone era, now replaced by the boiled down version - group chats with friends. Telegram has every feature you need in a platform and you get the joy of "circles" as one poster mentioned, by simply having different group chats.

Plus it's not exposed to the public.

can rename it botster

judging from what i hear people say. all you have to do is be able to display who's online from your friends list, and a chronologically ordered list of their posts. thats it. the major platforms are optimising for ads so much they cant even achieve this level of basic functionality

Could you make it so you can have group chats but you can invite anyone you’ve tapped before and they can all talk together (but still not be able to talk outside the group chat)

> So I created an iOS app

CTRL-F "android" "linux" "git" 0 results

sigh

PLEASE if you are developing only for the Mac ecosystem, you should be required to put (Mac only) in your title so the rest of us don't completely WASTE our time.

on the fading connection and monetization - you could let people pay to re-up the connection from fading as opposed to meeting in person again first, and its makes them really think about whether meeting in person is worth happening again or would ever happen again, is the connection itself valuable in another way any way

on instagram, there is a social disincentive to unfollow people and you can also make someone else unfollow you in a couple ways (the button that does just that, as well as blocking someone for a second and unblocking them), doing these actions has a real cost to confrontation. people you thought you would never see again will see you again and say "I thought we were following each other???? oooo :O ... ooooh >:O"

you are making that activity a first class citizen, with no presumption of ill will behind it, this has value to it

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He gave the guy $20k dollars in bitcoin (I can’t say how much bitcoin that is because it fluctuates too much to be a stable currency), to buy a dead domain that makes $9k a year in at revenue.

What an absolute garbage economy.