Friendster Failure, boo hoo hoo

Signal vs. Noise posted some of the highlights from a recent article about Friendster and how it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. After turning down a $30 million bid by Google, Friendster founder Abrams took on outside VC investment and only now, only now, does the article say it has its performance problems licked.

I remembered hearing this tune before, and sure enough, Philip Greenspun ran a usability analysis in his class on Friendster in 2003. Compare and contrast:

Matthew Drake, 2003: “The site is unbelievably slow, and this is a huge usability problem in my mind. Page load times are between 30 seconds and a minute depending on the page. I could speed page loads up to five or ten seconds by turning off images”.

Amerson Li, 2003: “Server speed is rather slow. This must be because of the great number of hits on the server. Sometimes, after I’ve read/replied to a message, it still appears on “Home” as having been unread. Also, whilst approving a testimonial, sometimes it doesn’t move the testimonial into the “approved” section until I refresh about 5 mins later. These could be bugs?”

New York Times, 2006: “As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download”.

It’s also interesting to note what Greenspun recommends Friendster do at the end: “flush MySQL” and “flush Tomcat” since they are both too slow and, of course, replace it with Oracle: “photo.net has an ancient 4-CPU database server running at 400 MHz with an old version of Oracle and it still manages to handle some fairly heavy traffic (see http://www.photo.net/about-us for stats; the site gets 10 million requests per day).”

Since Philip wrote those words, of course, the 800-pound gorilla of photo sharing, Flickr, has come of age and happens to run MySQL. According to the attached case study, they can manage the server load, and then some, because they can intelligently manage the photos. Greenspun’s own brainchild, photo.net, on the other hand, has since shrunk to about 5 million page requests a day (still not too shabby, we could all use 5 million a day I think) and has ’niched’ themselves as being the site for people wanting to learn more about photography (citing that the average user of photo.net spends $2,000 per year on photographic equipment).