Headline, January 19 2022/ LESSONS : ''' '' DEMISE -FRIENDSTER- *DEEMS '' '''

LESSONS : 

''' '' DEMISE -FRIENDSTER-

 *DEEMS '' '''

'' THE STUDENTS OF THE ENTIRE WORLD - The Global Founder Framers of !WOW! : Rabo, Dee, Haleema, Hussain, Shahzaib, Jordan, Bilal, Salar, Toby [China], Vishnu [India], Sahar, Zilli, -should ponder the mistakes of Friendster.''   

ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY - the exclusive ownership of every student in the world - [ in many, many ways ],  the demise of Friendster is a very cautionary tale. 

FRIENDSTER, a social media network founded in 2002, gained millions of users soon after it started but lost them as quickly, later metamorphosing into an online gaming site based in Malaysia before closing down entirely in 2018.

Already by 2009, The Onion satirical news site ran a story headlined ''Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins of ' Friendster ' Civilization.''

How did Friendster collapse so quickly and how can The World Students Society - the world's  greatest organization, - and Mr. Musk, the world's richest man, avoid making the same mistakes at Twitter, which he took over in late October?

An academic science called network science can shed light on the question, albeit without giving any firm answers. Just recently, I interviewed a scientist in the field, David Garcia, a Spaniard who is an expert in computational science and teaches in the department of public administration at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

The risk for Twitter, as for any social network, is ''unravelling,'' Mr. Garcia said. Something happens to raise the costs or reduce the benefits of being in the network. It could be a failed redesign of the interface or some kind of flame war [or a takeover by a divisive gazillionaire]. 

So a few people who were only marginally attached drop out. Some of their friends now have less reason to participate, so they drop out, too, and so on.

The snowball doesn't roll all the way down to zero users. There are tight knit groups of people who stay in the network because their friends are still in it. But there aren't enough of these clusters to entice advertisers, so the network hemorrhages money and eventually shuts down, Mr.Garcia said.

He described the process in a paper, ''Social Resilience in Online Communities : The Autopsy of Friendster,'' that compared Friendster to Livejournal, Facebook. Orkut and Myspace. He wrote the paper in 2013 with Pavlin Mavrodiev and Frank Schhweitzer, two colleagues from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he worked at the time.

Mathematically, a network will survive if enough big clusters remain to keep the network commercially viable after the marginal users get swept away. The key metric is what's called the k-core.

The ''k'' is the number of people a user is connected to; a ''core'' is a group of users. By definition the zero-core includes every user, even the people who aren't connected to anyone else. The 1-core includes only people who have at least one connection.

WHAT matters for a network is not just how many friends someone has, but how many friends the friends have. The 2-core includes only people who have at least two connections in the 2-core.

The 3-core includes only people who have at least three connections, and where each of those people also has at least three connections in the 3-core. And so on. Picture a k-core as a bunch of people in a circle who are connected to people opposite them as well as the ones to their sides.

The big idea of k-core analysis is that a network with lots of cross-connections [a ''mesh'' network] is more resilient than a network with one influencer at the center and lots of people on the periphery [a ''hub and spoke'' network].

Part of Friendster's problem was a lack of cross-connections. [This was the case in the United States, anyway; it did considerably better in the Philippines for some reason.]

''Rather than using Friendster to make dates and friends, most of its users were simply cruising around and looking at the weird interests, pictures and blog-droppings of strangers [including so-called fakester profiles of Jesus and Burt Reynolds ], a retrospective in Inc. magazine said.

THIS IS how social networks die. The risk, just as it is for !WOW! and Twitter, is the ''unravelling.'' Am I clear to you, too? : Sannan, Ahsen, Hamza, Nayab, Zaeem, Asim, Emaan [LUMS], Hazeem, Maria, Maynah, Hanyia and Merium.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on The World Students Society, the Global Founders of !WOW!, Networks, Mistakes and Attitudes, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Peter Coy, who has written about economics for nearly 40 years.

With most respectful and loving dedication to the Global Founder Framers of !WOW!, the great students of America, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on !WOW! - for every subject in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless