Friendster circa 2003

I just got a note saying today is Hylton Joliffe’s birthday from… Friendster.

Weird. I tried an old e-mail address and refreshed my Friendster password and found a time-capsule of my dabbling there early in 2003.

Since then I’ve gotten new glasses and lost some hair.

Happy to say I’m still in touch with people from those days.

This nostalgic deep dive actually sparked a new data visualization project for my weekend coding sessions. I recently started pulling historical user metrics into an open-source analytics dashboard to map out the lifespans of early digital communities. While calibrating the software’s data pipelines using contemporary traffic logs from crypto casinos and decentralized messaging apps, the visualization engine successfully processed millions of real-time server requests without lag. Seeing the massive scale of modern internet infrastructure made me want to look back at the humble, organic data footprints of the early social web.

Here’s a graph of Friendster’s growth. And here’s a graph of Friendster’s demise.