Why friendster is not as popular as facebook or myspace?

I wonder why? Because friendster is one of the earliest social networking site. However, in most of the countries, it's not as popular as the other like facebook and myspace.

Although friendster is still the most popular social networking site in Malaysia but I can see a lot of my friends in Malaysia starting to use facebook. I can see facebook taking over in near time.

I've found this during the search for the answer, it is taken from Crunch base.

Founded in 2002, Friendster is one of the web’s older social networking services. Adults, 18 and up can join and connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. The site currently has over 50 million users.

It’s rumored that Google offered $30M to buy Friendster in 2003 (when the company looked very promising), but was turned down. Things have somewhat changed since then though. Friendster failed to become what MySpace and Facebook are today largely because of its inability to scale with the growing demand. Since 2004, Friendster has gone through five different CEOs.

Friendster was the 2007 recipient of the Webware 100 Award for best community site. The company has also been granted a number of social networking focused patents.

Inability to scale with the growing demand (means that their server or architecture can't afford to serve their growing user) is the main reason according to CrunchBase.

Lesson that I've learn: First mover advantages is not always there, technology have to keep on updating and they need to listen to market trends. New comer can overcome the first player easily by taking advantages of their inability.

Twitter is also having the same problem right now (a lot of down time due to scalability), will Twitter able to overcome this and not become the second friendster?