[Sociam-soton] Anatomy of a dead social network

[electronic Max]

This is is a very interesting article from the perspective of the
life-cycle of social machines, since it discusses a number of factors
that contributed to Friendster's decline.

Interesting that they had access to the Friendster dataset; from a Web
Observatory perspective we might ask what aspects of this dataset were
most useful for this kind of analysis and how might we do the same /
deeper analyses for other systems?

>From MIT Technology Review:
Autopsy of a Dead Social Network
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511846/an-autopsy-of-a-dead-social-network/

Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before
Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often
thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks. At its peak, the
network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia.

In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the
site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to
other networks such as Facebook. Friendster, as social network, simply
curled up and died.

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Max