Friendster is often considered the originator of a social networking site.

Why did the social network die? Some Internet archaeologists have studied the wreckage of Friendster, giving us a more sober understanding of its cause of death.

Friendster was once the darling of social networks. Google had hoped to buy it for 30 million dollars as early as 2003, but the site was dead in 2006 because of the frequency of failures and the rise of rivals such as Facebook. Still, in the south-East Asian market, it has survived for years. Later, about 2009, a facelift completely destroyed it.

David Garcia, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, David Garcia that Friendster's ending is a bit like "directional blasting" and that loose friendships quickly disintegrate. Garcia recently collaborated with others in writing a paper devoted to analyzing the demise of Friendster.

Friendster had more than 100 million users, and a 2009 revision wiped it out.

Before Friendster 2011 as a gaming web site, the Internet Archive crawled through this defunct social network and left a snapshot. Garcia and his colleagues used these "directional blasting" snapshots to unfold the analysis. For the internet industry, they argue, this is both an archaeological and an autopsy.

They found that, by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the relationships in the social network were no longer close. The communication between users is greatly reduced, and the relationship between friends is becoming narrower. The relationship between users and the social network is becoming looser, so when the site is revamped, they think it's not worth wasting energy on.

The massive evacuation of users is unavoidable when the cost and energy of becoming a member of a social network outweigh the benefits that can be gained, researchers say. When a user leaves, his or her friends are likely to leave, so the entire social network will plummet like a waterfall.

But Garcia and his research partners also point out that the topological structure of the network provides a certain resilience to this decline. This resilience depends on the number of friends each user has.

If most of the users on social networks have only two friends, it is defenseless against the crash. Because when a user leaves, it causes another user to have only one friend left. The user is also likely to leave, while leaving another user with only one friend. The result is a full-scale evacuation of users across the network.

On the other hand, if most of the users on a social network have 10 friends, the chances of a network crash are much smaller as a result of losing a good friend.

As a result, the proportion of users with a certain number of friends on social networks is an important indicator of the fragility of the network.

"The first to evacuate is the outside of the nuclear user, and thus reduce the interests of the kernel users, resulting in the eventual collapse of the network." Garcia said.

The following figure summarizes the process of Friendster's demise:

The process of Friendster's demise

The researchers attributed the success of social networking to the so-called "K-core" (K-core), which not only had many friends but also had "resilience and social influence". When these K-nuclei disintegrate, the entire Friendster also falls apart.

If there is anything to learn from this data, it is that a social network that survives will not only have a large user base, but also have a close user relationship. So, Garcia believes Facebook should focus on the types of relationships between users and encourage them to build relationships with other tightly connected users.

In other words, the real component of a powerful social network is the tightly connected user, not the wandering individual.