It’s become de rigeur in digital-media circles that there can’t be a winner without a loser. When Google announced its $1.65 billion takeover of YouTube, wags were quick to identify Yahoo and News Corp. as the spurned suitors. And now observers are training their sights on the Ugly Betty of the social-networking space: Friendster, which might have been a MySpace. The site is no longer close to broke - in August it raised $10 million, with DAG Ventures in the lead - but its founder Jonathan Abrams won’t be shopping for his own 747. Over the weekend, under one of its overused the-web-is-a-party headlines, the NYT) identified Friendster as a “wallflower at the web party” that turned down a $30 million Google takeover offer back in 2002 when that was real money. Gary Rivlin tells the sad tale, notes the bad-in-retrospect advice Abrams got from its supposedly savvy investors, walks through what went wrong (fingers are pointed at Abrams’s personality, mission drift, slow technology). PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Friendster investor: “Friendster missed the chance to become a multibillion-dollar company, but I still see a lot of opportunity here”,“particularly outside North America. Wait: Isn’t that what happened to Orkut, another social-networking also-ran? But Orkut has something going for it that Friendster doesn’t: Google owns it already.
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