Layoffs at Friendster, Sassa out, no movie ?

BusinessWeek TheBeat confirms the Layoffs at Friendster, scooped yesterday by Niall Kennedy (who announced massive layoffs initially, and then referred to a handful of people). What I had not heard (and was scooped by Jeremy) is that Scott Sassa, the Hollywood-originated CEO, will be leaving a a few weeks, and will be replaced by Taek Kwon, currently executive VP of product and technology at Citysearch.com.

Not surprising indeed, since Friendster has been for a long time in search of a way to monetize its (then) large audience (including a movie), and is facing strong competition from MySpace and others.
The other rumor is that the company is about to get additional financing, probably from current investors (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Battery Ventures, Benchmark Capital). Difficult to see an upround coming through here, given that the last was at a post-money valuation of $53M.

No the real question: what is going to happen to the Friendster movie :-) ?

The first generation of social networking sites (Friendster, Tribe, ZeroDegrees, Orkut, ...) have all gone through ups and downs (more downs) as they were pioneering in this new space - and not really figuring out a business model for themselves, besides advertising. Social networking is now an integral part of the fabric of Internet applications, but offers limited value in its own right - with a very quick decay of one's interest.

Until Y!360 gets integrated in My Yahoo, or vice-versa, I will not feel compelled to visit it that often. Whilst it is a neat implementation, and useful integration of certain (still marginal) services, I don't have any reason to come back to it again, and again - as I do with My Yahoo. But I remember the morning it was released: we were all super excited, until we had  received our invitation, connected with our usual friends on that SN, had discovered the main  features and posted about them. Kids with new toys, sort of.

At the end of the day, only LinkedIn still gets my "eyeballs", and generates value for me.

Comments

[Greg Linden]

Hi, Jeff. Could you elaborate on how LinkedIn generates value for you? I've been a LinkedIn user for quite a while and haven't extracted much value from it yet. How do you find it useful?

[Adam]

Greg, good to see you here!

LinkedIn generates value for me because I live in Silicon Valley and I often do business development, and it helps me get introductions to the people I need to see to drive business.

LinkedIn also generates value for me because I know a lot of people, and people come to me looking for jobs (and wondering if I can suggest a place) and/or looking for people (and wondering if I can suggest someone good for them to interview). I can use it to make introductions easily that include peoples' backgrounds -- I think in some places a person's LinkedIn profile is more important than their resume, because it tells a would-be employer what *people* we have in common.

My two cents...

[doug hirsch]

jeff - i couldn't agree more. tons of social networks, and only ones that truly fill a real need are going to be around in the future. real needs, btw, are things like sex and/or money. linked in = jobs = money. the others, unless they morph into full-fledged dating sites (aka sex), are gonna be stuck hawking bottom-barrel CPM ads for eternity.

[Jeff Clavier]

Greg> Adam says it all (thanks Dude :-).

Adam and I were both early adopters, and Ross Mayfield taught me the rule of only connecting to people I knew "online". Applying this allowed me create a "quality" network, that allows me to discover path to people I need to connect to. I am also getting quite a bit of dealflow through LinkedIn.

However, given how big LinkedIn has become, it takes quite a bit of connecctions to actually get value out of it.

[Greg Linden]

Thanks, Adam and Jeff. Until now, I have thought of LinkedIn as a bit of a toy. Perhaps I will experiment with using it a little more seriously. Thanks again.