It’s really not even worth comparing the two social networking sites since Facebook wins hands down. However, it’s worth comparing to show how Facebook kicked Friendster to the curb. Friendster was all the rage back in 2003 and quickly the site was swamped with traffic and never fully recovered. It even told Google to take it’s USD 30 million offer and get lost. I used it for a while but after the increased traffic slowed it down I rarely used it. About a year back I started to hear about Facebook and thought, here we go again another Friendster wannabe.
But this time it was different, the site was written around the highly scalable LAMP architecture. One of the innovative features it had over Friendster was the ability to import your e-mail addresses from a Hotmail or Gmail and quickly find people already using Facebook. The other cool feature was a “mini-feed” that showed what OTHER people were doing on Facebook. If someone added vacation photos or joined a new group you would know about it.
For me one of the biggest selling points to using Facebook was its iPhoto plugin. I could take pictures with my digital camera and then load them into iPhoto as I normally do. Then I could select which pictures I wanted to upload to Facebook and even tag people in the pics…brilliant.
But, it ain’t all fun and games. A friend (ahem, AZ) asked me “dude, aren’t you too old to be on Facebook?” Ouch.
celestri - virtual home of manish jain 