"While Friendster is reemerging as a dominant force overseas in the field of social networking, time wasn’t long ago when the once-mighty company was on its last legs. A New York Times article wonders “what happened to Friendster?” and chastises it for passing up “a billion dollar opportunity” during the height of its success. Many have privately speculated that there was no one thing Friendster did wrong. Rather, they believe, people just use whatever site their friends use, which, eventually, became MySpace and Facebook instead. Regardless, Friendster boasts one of the more high-profile “fall from grace” stories in recent years."

That's kind of wrong. All my friends in the east coast were in friendster first, but the site became so slow and painful to navigate or do anything that even something like myspace was such a refresh.

The other blunder that Friendster did at the time, was to allow people see who visited your profile. I bet their pageviews dropped overnight.

I think this is a classical case of bad execution ruining a startup.