TheCircuitSide.com

During the earlier days of the boom of social networking services, there was only one well-known name among many people across the world. Before MySpace and YouTube became famous, internet surfers got acquainted with Friendster.

Friendster was created and developed by Jonathan Abrams. This software engineer who formerly worked for Netscape thought that online dating sites during the time were quite ‘creepy’, and thus he was inspired to develop his own social networking service. The idea of the site back then was to get people to meet other people through the friends and other social connections that they have. In other words, people would meet friends of friends, and effectively make more friends in the process.

The name ‘Friendster’ is a combination of the words ‘friend’ and ‘Napster’, the controversial file sharing program. While Napster enables a user to share information over the internet, Friendster enables a user to make himself or his friends known over the internet.

Over the years, Friendster has had so many changes and additions in terms of user interface and features. The profile, which a majority of ‘Friendsters’ consider as vital to their purpose in the site, used to have a simple layout. People who were members of Friendster since its beginnings can recall how the simple options the site had in terms of profile-building. It simply contained a list of likes and dislikes in media categories, in addition to personal information regarding age, location, and hometowns. People definitely had the option of uploading photos as well, but there was a significant limit determining how many photos a profile can have at one time.