The Billion-Dollar Blackhole of Social Media

Will anyone miss GeoCities, the antiquated homepage service Yahoo bought for $3.5 billion in 1999, and then left to rot? Venture capitalist Fred Wilson will — he hasn't seen that kind of payday in ages. More »

Friendster founder still pretty bitter

I like how New York Times reporter Brad Stone ends his doom-and-gloom trend piece in today's paper — with a quote from a man who has more reason to be paranoid and jaded than most, failed Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. Abrams, who now runs a six-person startup called Socializr, says he's prepared to “hunker down if things go bad," a scenario he's certainly familiar with. Then like some man on the corner wearing a sandwich board, Abrams rails against all what Stone describes as the "uninspired, copycat entrepreneurs" of Silicon Valley who are "obsessed with the internal gossip and minutiae of the industry." More »

Googler jumps ship for Faceb... erm, Friendster

Richard Kimber, managing director of Southeast Asian operations at Google, won't be moving into the search giant's new Sydney offices. Instead, he'll serve as the new CEO of Friendster — probably enticed by a healthy share of the early social network's latest $20 million in venture capital. While it remains to be seen if Kimber can help the company's investors limp to liquidity (read: trolling for cash with Friendster's social network patents), he can probably introduce Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams to all sorts of Vietnamese hotties.

A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg

Digg cofounder Jay Adelson is now asked by the likes of Kara Swisher how he'd fix big media companies, as in this clip. But there was a time when he barely knew what to do with his own Internet startup, Equinix. That tale and more covers 54 out of 294 pages in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's soon-to-be-released book about Web 2.0. The first page of the book's index, one of many to come: More »

Geeks gone mild raid Uncov shindig

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Noah Kagan, the martyr of Facebook

With Facebook friends like these, who needs enemies? Noah Kagan, who left his job at the social network abruptly in mid-2006, now has a Facebook group in his honor: "Boycott Facebook until Noah Kagan is re-hired!" Valley prankster and Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams created the group. We pinged Kagan, who's now working happily at online personal-finance startup Mint.com and blogging at Okdork.com. Kagan, when pinged on IM, was as bemused as we were to hear about the group, but had no idea why Abrams was starting it a year after his departure. The Facebook group, however, might not be telling the whole story about the Facebooker's departure: A well-placed tipster says Kagan was fired for leaking company secrets to TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

Friendster's founder just copied a friend

Friendster inventor Jonathan Abrams ripped off a pal's business networking idea and slapped a dating model on it, according to Sean Ness. Sean tells major blog Boing Boing: More »