What If Google Had Bought Friendster?

Hitwise's chart of popular Google services practically reads like a timeline, with older projects being more popular than their quality, and younger projects being less popular (some are never even noticed by the market). Friendster was actually popular once, and certainly was when Google almost bought it. If Google was stuck with a popular property when it was a smaller company, it would have put a lot of effort behind that company. We might have seen less of the small products we have seen from Google. Perhaps Google wouldn't have the focus to buy Keyhole, and revolutionize things with Google Maps and Google Earth. I wonder if we'd never get Gmail, but instead watched as Google tried to convince us all to communicate through Friendster. I'll bet that if Google had bought Friendster, Friendster would still have lost just like it did without Google. The difference: They would have dragged down Google with them. Google would have watched as Friendster fell apart, and it had nothing but search to fall back on. Sure, Google search would still be popular, but the money and effort poured into Friendster would have dragged the stock price down. Google would have bought other social sites, like del.ioio.us, Flickr, maybe even Digg and YouTube, in an attempt to beat MySpace, and the company would be suffering ten times worse than Yahoo is now. In two weeks, as the last piece of its Vista launch, Microsoft would announce it had bought Google. Bookmark Murdok: InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines. Visit the

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