Friendster Versus Pimp MyYearbook

Posted on October 21, 2006

The New York Times has an article about the woes of Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. The article says Abrams turned down a $30 million offer from Google to buy the Friendster website, which was a very hot site at the time. Now the site is still struggling and the Times says the site has even fallen behind a site recently launched by a 16-year-old called myYearBook.

Reality must smack even harder just after the blockbuster deal in which Google agreed to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube, the video-sharing Web site that has yet to celebrate its first anniversary or its first profits. Friendster essentially created the social networking sector three years ago by offering users a site where they could browse profiles posted by friends and the friends of friends in search of dates and playmates. But so badly did Friendster fumble its early lead that, as of last month, it ranked 14th among all social networking sites tracked by comScore Media Metrix, trailing even myYearbook.com, a site started last year by a 16-year-old high school student.

Trailing a site started in 2005 by a 16-year-old? That's really not good but there is a good reason why the recently launched social network is becoming popular. myYearbook.com has a pimp section where you can pimp up your site with images, glitter, Halloween graphics, fridge magnets, fireworks and more. There's also a picture drawing tools and an automatic glitter word generator. myYearbook.com also offers falling objects. This tool let's you convert any image into an ojbect that will fall repeatedly on your myYearbook profile. Give young teens what they want -- a crazy blingy page full of glitter, flash and falling objects -- and you will get traffic. MyYearbook also says it can copy your MySpace profile over to myYearbook in "one easy step." That probably helps too.