establish in 2002 , Friendster was a groundbreaker among social networks , beating MySpace and Facebook to the view and , at its flush , boasting over 100 million users . In 2009 , though , it fleetly descended into irrelevance and abstruseness — and reckoner scientists have been scraping though its remains towork out on the nose what go wrong .
It ’s an interesting exercise in learning about how societal networks succeed and fail . David Garcia , from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich , explains that when costs — the time and effort — associated with being a member of a internet outweigh benefits , then the time can be correct for exodus .
But there ’s a picayune more to it than that . In fact , the structure of friendship on the web can make the whole matter more or less susceptible to failure . Technology Review explain :
[ R]esilience is determine by the number of friends that individual user have . So if a big fraction of people on a web have only two acquaintance , it is highly vulnerable to collapse . That ’s because when a individual person exits , it leaves somebody with only one admirer . This mortal is then likely expiration leaving another with only one champion and so on . The result is a shower of exists that sweeps through the web .
However , if a large fraction of masses on the mesh have , say , ten friends , the loss of one protagonist is much less likely to set off a cascade . So the fraction of the meshing with a certain figure of friends is a crucial indicator of the internet ’s exposure to cascade .
In reality , a proportionality of those two factors — price - welfare and connectedness — is what can split up a societal connection . In the case of Friendster , a site redesign make the cost - to - welfare ratio to plump , to a point where connectedness just could n’t guard the thing together . So when a trickle of use get down to leave behind , friends realized lodge around was senseless . The rest is history . [ arXivviaTechnology Review ]
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