Facebook’s Early Decisions: How It Beat Friendster and MySpace

Friendster got the big idea right. Jonathan Abrams wanted people to meet through mutual friends, and in 2003 millions signed up to map their real social circles. The site’s problem was that every page had to calculate who was connected to whom, up to several steps away, and that became harder as the network grew. Users waited for pages to load, and many gave up.

Friendster also chose to fight its users. People created joke profiles for celebrities, places and ideas, known as Fakesters, and Friendster deleted them. MySpace, launched that August, welcomed them, along with the bands and club promoters who had been active on Friendster. By the time Friendster fixed its technology, its American users had moved on. It thrived for a while in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia before closing in 2015.

MySpace was no failure. It was the most visited website in America in mid-2006, launched the careers of musicians and gave millions of teenagers their first web page. Its weakness was the flip side of its strength. Letting users rewrite their profile pages created a creative, chaotic look, but it also brought slow pages, security holes and spam, and made it hard for MySpace to roll out new features across the site.

After News Corporation bought MySpace’s parent for about $580 million in July 2005, and especially after a $900 million advertising deal with Google in 2006, MySpace was under pressure to show more ads and hit traffic targets. Facebook, still controlled by its founders, could focus on product changes such as News Feed and Platform. By the time MySpace redesigned itself around music and entertainment, its users had moved to Facebook.

Two decades after the race was decided, its losers are trying again, with a pitch built on what modern social media has lost. The new Friendster, launched in April 2026, only lets you add people you meet in person. MySpace’s owners talk of an algorithm-free relaunch with profile songs and a chronological feed. Both are betting on fatigue with feeds dominated by recommended videos and ads.

Facebook itself has made a similar diagnosis. In March 2025 it launched a Friends tab showing only posts from friends, which Zuckerberg called the first phase of bringing back ‘OG Facebook’. In November 2025 a US judge rejected the FTC’s claim that Meta held a monopoly, finding that its real competition now comes from TikTok and YouTube, not from social networks built on friendships; the FTC has appealed. The question that decided the 2000s, whether people want to see what their friends are doing, is being asked again.

Facebook arrived after Friendster and MySpace and did not invent anything they had not tried. What it did was make a series of choices that reinforced each other: a closed, trusted start, steady expansion, a reliable and simple site, features that gave people reasons to return, and an open door only when the network was ready. Its rivals each made at least one choice, on technology, identity or ownership, that it avoided.

The lasting lesson is that being first creates an opportunity, but sustained product execution and the ability to adapt decide who keeps it. In 2026, as Friendster and MySpace return promising the friend-focused social web that Facebook itself is trying to recover, that lesson applies to Facebook too.