Tales of Woe

With everyone talking about the YouTube - Google deal, the New York Times takes a great look at former Valley darling, Friendster.

Here's the link (you may have to sign up).

Friendster could've sold to Google in a pre-IPO stock deal of about $30 million (which would've been worth about $300 million on the day they went public). The big, bad Venture Capitalists told them to go it alone -- they were going to be huge.

Last year they shopped the site around for $20 million and found no takers.

Friendster is re-positioning itself as a site for "for an older demographic group — people 25 to 40 — who do not have the time or inclination to spend hours each day on MySpace".

This may actually have some legs. My friends have created MySpace profiles but continue to update their Friendster profiles. We certainly don't use it as much as we once did, but it's not like we've totally forgotten about it either. In any case, certainly a great lesson in "take the money and run".