From friends of friends
to games and back.

The oldest Friendster capture in this collection, November 2002, asks for a beta code. A small field and an Enter button sit under Friendster Beta; the dark header holds a white wordmark and an outlined smiling face. The footer already says Friendster, Inc. This invitation-only screen predates the public beta, which Salon dates to March 2003.^[2]

Friendster's July 2003 homepage explains the network before asking you to enter it. The face diagram sits beside a short introduction, followed by links for a tour, testimonials and more information. Dating comes first in the list of uses. Making friends and helping friends meet other people follow it.

That friendly diagram had a limit: users could see only four degrees out from their own profiles. Researcher danah boyd describes how adding a popular fictional account, a Fakester, widened the network you could see.^[3] A joke profile could also be a shortcut.

Friendster once put a popularity ranking on members' homepages. By the time that feature disappeared, boyd records, Burning Man and Ali G each had more than 10,000 friends. The company deleted fictional accounts; users formed the Fakester Revolution, and profile farms recreated deleted characters.^[1] The rankings lived on members' own pages, so the signed-out homepages here never show them.

The June 2004 homepage keeps the diagram and the two small entry buttons. Below the introduction, the footer includes a Store link and Patent Pending. The drawing makes the network look manageable. The characters collecting thousands of friends were already using it on a different scale.

Friendster's January 2005 homepage puts organize your social life just below the dark header. The face network survives, but the left column now gives members an email-and-password form. Underneath, the page lists things you might actually come back to do: find old friends, check how people are connected, remember birthdays, meet someone through a friend and browse shared interests.

The bottom row is a set of endorsements. TIME, Wired and Webby badges sit beside a TRUSTe privacy seal. Their image descriptions in the capture's HTML name the awards and privacy statement. That row gives a new visitor another reason to hand over an email address.

There had already been a chance to sell the site. The New York Times reported that founder Jonathan Abrams rejected an offer of about $30 million from Google and chose venture funding; Friendster took $13 million from Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark.^[4] Here, the invitation to join is still small enough to fit beside a diagram.

Friendster's June 2006 homepage is full of people before you log in. Photos lead into People and Fan Profiles, while Blogs & Reviews continues below the first screen. A sign-in panel occupies the right column. The little face diagram has given way to rows of actual member content, so we have blurred private members' pictures and identifying text in these reproductions.

The strip above the rows says Find, Connect and Stay in Touch. The neighboring search box advertises more than 27 million profiles. Across the top, the navigation leads to Home, Profile, Friends, Search, Video, Classifieds, Discussions and Games, while the photo tabs below let visitors choose Latest, Featured Photos, Most Grabbed or Most Discussed and the People section divides New Members from Popular profiles. Farther down, Top Searches includes Father's Day cards, gifts for Dad and ties. This capture is dated June 13: even the small search suggestions carry a moment in the calendar.

The 2007 capture keeps the directory; in 2008, Apps on Friendster takes over the banner above it.

The footer changes from Patent Pending. in June 2006 to U.S. Patent No. 7,069,308 in January 2007. The patent record dates that grant to June 27, 2006, two weeks after our earlier capture.^[5]

Friendster's June 2009 homepage clears away the member rows. A blue panel puts login and friend search on the left, with a much larger registration form on the right. At the bottom of that form, registering means accepting the terms and certifying that you are over 16. The page is asking for a new account again.

The next capture changes the logo as well. A white handwritten wordmark sits on a green cloud, surrounded by colored curls and doodles. TechCrunch reported the Connecting Smiles redesign in December 2009.^[6] The 2010 page has one practical suggestion beneath Join Friendster: visitors without an email address can get a free Yahoo Mail account.

Friendster's audience had shifted too. In the December 2009 acquisition announcement, the company said more than 90% of daily traffic came from Asia, alongside more than 75 million registered users.^[7] In our June 2011 capture, the decorative surround is gone. The join panel now calls Friendster the social gaming destination of choice, invites visitors to connect and play with friends, and asks them to share their progress with their network, while a checkbox on the left offers to make Games the start page.

The change reached into people's saved memories. On April 26, 2011, TechCrunch reported a plan to remove photos, blogs, comments and groups, with an exporter that could download material or move it to Flickr or Multiply. Accounts and friend lists were supposed to remain.^[8] May 31 was the initially announced deadline; these captures do not establish the final deletion date.

Friendster's June 2013 homepage has a different set of instructions: Meet More, Play More and Earn More. Red, yellow and green circles hover over a game-art banner. The signup box underneath offers Facebook as the way in. That blue button now sits where the old network once explained friends of friends.

TechCrunch had reported the games relaunch, including Facebook Connect, on June 29, 2011.^[9] The 2013 capture makes the arrangement visible. Its browser title is Friendster.com - Living the Game. We hid an archived form-validation notice to keep the signup panel readable.

By June 2014, Friendster's homepage is a games portal from top to bottom. A DIVOSAGA banner has a Play now button; latest-news columns report game maintenance, and featured games lead into a much longer All Games grid. Scroll to the bottom and the footer points to Friendster iCafe, Friendster Hotspots and MOL.com. The featured row lists Boomz, Crystal Legacy, Divosaga FX, Drakensang Online, Darkorbit, Lord of Ages, Dungeon Inquisitor and Sushido above an All Games grid that also includes Voodoo Potions, Jewel Pursuit, Kapi Hospital, Cyberdunk, and Funnily Poker. There are 38 tiles in that lower grid.

Friendster's June 2015 homepage replaces the game grid with a yellow note, pinned at one corner. Its heading says Friendster is Taking A Break. The notice dates the service pause to June 14, 2015 and directs remaining Friendster Wallet questions to a support address. The green logo still carries living the game, but the note below it has become the whole reason to open the page.

The same notice is still there in our 2019 and 2020 captures, archived from the site's index page: years after the games had gone, the address still showed the goodbye. The capture gaps between these dates are explained below. By 2024, the address would be asking for email addresses again.

Friendster's June 2024 homepage returns to a circle of faces, this time floating beside an early-access email field. A blue smiley sits beside a bold lowercase wordmark. Bringing it Back to the People is the headline; underneath, the page promises a contemporary version of the early social network.

The address itself had changed hands. In his April 2026 account of the purchase, Mike Carson says he paid $20,000 in Bitcoin and traded another domain that made about $9,000 a year in advertising revenue.^[10] The other address was part of the price. The account's publication date does not date the transaction.

The 2025 Friendster page adds four cards about users, data, advertisers and a friendly social space. Its small print draws a firm boundary: Friendster Labs has no relation to or access to previous data hosted on friendster.com. The old address and smiley are back. The old photos are not being offered back with them.

Friendster's live homepage on October 18, 2026 opens with Real friends. Real life. Above a pair of app-download buttons, the larger heading promises Social networking, without the nonsense. The wordmark has a capital F and black lettering; a blue smiley remains. A phone mockup shows a friends' feed alongside the invitation.

The page says to add friends in person, then share posts and messages inside that network. Farther down, four panels promise Friends only, No ads, No spam and Privacy first. These are the current operator's claims, not an audit of the apps. The footer identifies Friendster Labs Inc, and the download links point to iPhone and Android apps.

The 2003 diagram drew a line from your face to a friend, then to someone you might meet. The new page asks you to make that connection in person first. Twenty-three years after that diagram, Friendster is explaining who belongs in your circle again.