I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It

Friendster was the first social network. It has a long history, but the website friendster.com went dead in 2015 and the company officially shut down three years later in 2018. That’s where this story begins.

The domain name friendster.com was registered on March 22 2002. After the site shut down in 2015, the domain did not resolve for 8 years. However, in October 2023 I noticed that the domain name was resolving once again, but it was showing a lot of popup ads. I was curious who owned it, so I looked at the WHOIS info and recognized the owner as a customer of park.io, a company I founded in 2014, and that I had corresponded with him previously over email.

I reached out to him and said I was interested to buy the domain. He told me he had bought it for $8k and now was making ad revenue from the existing traffic. He bought it at gname.com, a site that hosts expired domain name auctions where you can buy prerelease domains from various Chinese/Asian registrars.

The domain had expired and was up for auction and he got the domain as the high bidder for $7456. You can see the final auction page in the screenshot above.

Can you believe he bought the domain friendster.com for only $7456? What a crazy deal! I’m in the domain name business and I check domain name auctions almost daily, but I still didn’t see this one. I wasn’t familiar with gname.com. You’d have to be specifically watching the domain friendster.com at the right time to find and participate in the auction, or you’d have to actively watch gname.com daily to see this auction.

He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin.

There is only one friendster.com domain name in the world, and I found the idea of owning it very fun and interesting. Building a social network on Friendster seemed like it would be so much fun.

So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of the domain name friendster.com.

Today I feel that social networks foster a lot of negativity, but I remembered Friendster as being a really positive and enjoyable experience (except when the site would not load, which was really frustrating). I wanted to create something positive — something that people would enjoy and find useful.

I created a basic social network on friendster.com and invited some people in from the waitlist, but they didn’t seem super excited about it. Not selling data, no algorithms, ads, etc.. was nice but didn’t seem enough of a draw. I wondered what else I could do. So I posted to Hacker News.

There were a lot of really good comments and feedback, but I thought this one was especially interesting:

The idea that the only way to connect as friends on Friendster is by tapping phones was fun because it would promote people meeting in person. It would also verify that you are connecting to real people, and people that you actually want to connect with.

So I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.

At first I made it so that the only way to even sign up or join was to tap phones with someone already on Friendster, but this failed Apple App Store review because of Guideline 4.2 — Design — Minimum Functionality. They said “the usefulness of the app is limited because it seems to be intended for a small, or niche, set of users. Specifically, the app is intended for invited friends only.” So I modified the app so that anyone can sign up, but the only way to connect with others is to tap phones.

The review process at Apple took a long time, between one and two months. But now Friendster is finally live in the Apple App Store!

On making money: I don’t really care about making money from Friendster, but I’d like it to eventually pay for itself. I’ll probably offer a paid plan for premium features down the road — but that’s a problem for later.

What I’m building toward

A few features I’m experimenting with to make Friendster feel different from other social networks:

1. Friends of friends. You can see your friends’ friends and request to message them. The hope is that people use it as a reason to actually meet up — connect on Friendster the real way, by tapping phones in person.
2. Fading connections. If two friends go a full year without tapping phones, the link between them softens. Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online.

All of this is built around the simple idea that real friendships happen when you actually meet in person.

Why I’m doing this

My wife and I met on OkCupid. I wouldn’t have my kids without it. Websites like that genuinely change the course of people’s lives — people meet, fall in love, build families. That’s incredible to me.

If Friendster helps even a few people find that kind of connection, it will have been worth it.