Thursday, May 24, 2007 Ng: ‘Unsuccessful’ popular inventions By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
I WAS in a seminar yesterday, and I was really amazed to learn how many Filipinos are in Friendster.
Friendster is considered the original of the so-called social networking sites, and when it debuted in 2003, it grew so fast that it was heralded as one of the best inventions of 2003 by Time Magazine. Jonathan Abrams, its founder, was called by Entertainment Weekly as the “Friendliest man of the Year.”
Friendster opened in March 2003, and by June, it had already 835,000 members. Scarcely, four months later, it had over 2 million members, generating over 10 million page views per day. For a while, Friendster was touted to be the harbinger of the dot com renaissance after it crashed in 2001.
However, the growth sputtered off, and I just saw a recent analysis in INC Magazine.
One of the defining points was that while they were touting that they had so many members, they noted sometime in early 2004 that the traffic occurs at around midnight their time, and suddenly they found out that a bulk of their members were actually from the Philippines!
The article said that it created an emergency on their part, and actually derailed plans, because it was something they did not expect.
When you have lots of traffic, you tout it to advertisers, but advertisers advertise only if the demographics are what they want.
They wondered how they could get US advertisers to pay up if it was attracting eyeballs in the Philippines, which, in the most American advertiser’s thinking, wouldn’t necessarily be the market for their products, and, therefore, would make them hesitate to advertise.
Other than this, there were also technological and structural issues in the company, and pretty soon, Friendster lost its popularity to MySpace. For instance, by the end of 2004, the latter overtook Friendster in terms of membership, and by September of 2005, MySpace was seen as having 22 million users, while Friendster was stuck with just over a million.
Right now, Friendster is billed as it also runs in the social networks place. It ranks 13th place in the US, and its market share is perceived to be less than one percent. However, the Filipinos continued to be big there. It is perceived that Friendster has probably a few million members in the Philippines!
Another thing that is perceived to be really hot but did not turn out as successful was the idea to provide free wireless Internet through WiFI technologies.
Many cities were perceived to be starting this, including San Francisco, London, Philadelphia, Portland and Taipei. But the latest reports say that many of them are finding it hard to be sustainable.
For instance, in Lompoc California, which is a $3-million project to provide WiFi to a city of 42,000, only has a few hundred subscribers. Earthlink, which installed its technology in New Orleans, Milpitas, Anaheim and Philadelphia, was said to have only 2,000 customers. MetroF which installed WiFi in Portland said that about 1,000 use the network on any given day.
Municipal WiFi projects use the same technology as those used in coffee shops and airports. However, the problem is WiFi was designed to be used in smaller quarters and not citywide deployments.
For instance, the signal could not go beyond walls and since the user has to be not farther than 300 feet to 500 feet from the access point, this means the provider has to put up as many as 25 access points per square mile, so network costs really zoom up.
If the provider scrimps, it can also mean spotty or bad signals, which discourage users.
Probably, when new technologies like WiMax, which can reach much bigger ranges, come up, it will be easier.
But for now, many people I know also use cell signals using 3G and HSDPA technologies.
This one is truly ubiquitous because in most places where there is a signal, you can also easily surf. Whatever technologies win, we can look forward for it to be easier and cheaper, hopefully, to be in touch at all times.
