Who owns Friendster today?
The Friendster name belongs to Friendster Labs Inc., a company set up by Mike Carson, a programmer based in Philadelphia who noticed the lapsed domain resolving again in 2023 and bought it.
The app he built launched on April 29, 2026, and it runs on iOS only. There are no ads, no algorithmic feed, no follower counts and no suggested strangers. The rule that got the relaunch written up everywhere is the friending mechanic: the only way to add someone is to tap two iPhones together, in person, using Apple's NameDrop gesture. Connections also decay. If two people stop seeing each other in real life, the link between them weakens on its own.
Carson told Cybernews in 2026 that the motive was corrective. "Today I feel that social networks foster a lot of negativity, but I remembered Friendster as being a really positive and enjoyable experience," he said.
None of the old data came back with the name. Profiles written in 2003 were destroyed in 2011 and no public archive of them survives, so the 2026 app is a new network wearing an old label.
Why did Jonathan Abrams turn down $30 million from Google?
Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in 2002 and opened the public beta in March 2003. By the fall of that year, still in beta, close to three million people had signed up. Google noticed and offered roughly $30 million to buy the company.
Abrams said no. His investors, who included Peter Thiel and Google's own early backer K. Ram Shriram, argued there was too much money being left on the table. In October 2003, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Benchmark Capital put about $13 million into the company at a reported $53 million valuation, well above what Google had offered for all of it.
The decision was not obviously wrong at the time. Friendster had the growth curve, the network effects and the only proof anywhere that ordinary people would put their real names and real photographs on the web and come back daily to look at them. It belongs in the same file as the deal where Yahoo passed on buying Google: a sensible call in the moment that aged into a punchline.
Why did Friendster pages take 40 seconds to load?
Friendster kept its social graph in a relational database. That is fine for looking up one person and poor at answering the question the entire product was built around: how am I connected to this stranger? Every new member did not add one row. They added thousands of possible paths the database had to walk in real time.
Under load the math stopped working. Friendster pages took as long as 40 seconds to appear. In 2003, with most American households on dial-up or early DSL, 40 seconds was not a slow page. It was a closed tab.
The engineering team tried the obvious repairs through 2003: spreading MySQL across more servers, adding load balancers, tuning queries. What it could not do was replace the foundation while the site was still growing and rivals were launching. Management made it worse by shipping features, which added load, and then by slowing user acquisition instead of buying capacity.
Why did Friendster delete the Fakesters?
By mid-2003 users had filled Friendster with profiles for things that were not people: celebrities, pets, bands, cities, Jackalope, God, Beer and more than a dozen Homer Simpsons. Friendster called them Fakesters and treated them as a threat to the premise of the site.
Abrams was blunt about it in Salon in August 2003. "Fake profiles really defeats the whole point of Friendster," he said, explaining that when thousands of people link themselves to one popular Fakester, the connection map stops meaning anything.
He was right about the mechanic and wrong about the fix. Friendster hired support staff and purged the accounts, and the purge turned into whack-a-mole: deleted profiles came straight back as duplicates. What it also did was punish the most creative users on the platform at the exact moment MySpace was inviting them to customize everything. MySpace had launched in August 2003, months after the Friendster beta, with much the same feature set plus editable HTML profiles and music.
Where did the 115 million users go?
Abrams was removed as chief executive in April 2004 and Tim Koogle, the former Yahoo chief executive, came in on an interim basis. Replacements followed replacements. Facebook had launched that February, restricted to Harvard students, with an architecture built for social graphs and a founder nobody was about to remove.
Friendster kept growing anyway, just not where its investors lived. By 2008 it reported more than 115 million registered users, and over 90% of its traffic came from Asia, led by the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. In the United States and Europe the argument was already over.
In December 2009 the Malaysian internet payments company MOL Global bought Friendster for $39.5 million. After roughly $13 million in secured debt, fees and executive bonuses, shareholders received $26.4 million, less than Google had offered six years earlier. MOL then sold 18 of Friendster's social networking patents to Facebook for $40 million, transferred on June 7, 2010, which recovered the entire purchase price on paper.
What happened to the old profiles and photos?
In April 2011 Friendster told users that all profiles, photos, messages and friend connections would be deleted on May 31 of that year. In June it reopened as a social gaming site. Eight years of user-generated content was erased on schedule, and unlike the volunteer scramble that saved much of GeoCities, no large-scale rescue of Friendster pages happened before the deadline.
The gaming version lasted four years. On June 14, 2015 the site and its services shut down indefinitely, replaced by a notice saying the company was taking a break. The stated reason was demand: "the online gaming community did not engage as much as we had hoped for," Friendster wrote, citing the state of the social gaming industry. The corporate entity was not formally wound up until 2018.
That is the part of the story the 2026 relaunch cannot undo. A Facebook account opened in 2008 still holds its photos. A Friendster account opened in 2003 holds nothing, because the company that owned it decided storage was a cost rather than a promise.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Friendster still around in 2026?
Friendster is around in 2026, but only as a new product. The original social network deleted every user profile on May 31, 2011 and shut its services down on June 14, 2015. The name relaunched on April 29, 2026 as an iOS app from Friendster Labs Inc., with no ads, no algorithm, and friends added only by tapping two iPhones together in person.
Who founded Friendster and who owns it now?
Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in 2002 and opened it in beta in March 2003, and he was removed as chief executive in April 2004. The company was sold to the Malaysian payments firm MOL Global in December 2009 for $39.5 million. The name is now held by Friendster Labs Inc., the company behind the 2026 app, run by the programmer Mike Carson.
Why did Friendster fail?
Friendster failed for three reasons that compounded between 2003 and 2005. Its relational database could not answer social graph queries at scale, so pages took as long as 40 seconds to load. Its 2003 purge of the joke profiles known as Fakesters turned its most active users against it. And the removal of founder Jonathan Abrams in April 2004 left product decisions to a rotating management team while MySpace and Facebook grew.