In April 2017, Gimlet Media’s “Startup” podcast had two episodes about the story of Friendster.
ROBERT SIEGEL: Young adults by the hundreds of thousands have been signing up at a website called Friendster.
LISA: In the first year, Friendster grew to over 4 million users.
ROBERT KRULWICH: We’ve all heard that everybody on earth is connected, but now there’s a website called Friendster.
LISA: It was the hot new internet thing, the first site to really take off after the dot com bubble had burst.
CHARLIE ROSE: Friendster has quickly grown to become one of the top 100 highest trafficked sites on the network, with more than 8 million users.
LISA: The idea of an online social network was so new at this time that Friendster was able to patent it. Patent number 7 million 69 thousand 3 hundred 8. “System, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”
Read more or listen at gimletmedia.com.