You could argue Friendster lost a lot of its early, first mover, momentum to MySpace and Facebook because of its initial implementation in Java JSP. By the time of its rewrite in PHP, MySpace had become the "in place", followed fairly quickly by Facebook (while MySpace foundered under Newscorp ownership).
You don't hear about the failures because they rarely get enough traction to be popular (and if they got traction then typically investors will pour money in to keep the startup afloat).
Also many survivors of such startups are under NDAs which mostly serve to protect the management teams.
You could argue Friendster lost a lot of its early, first mover, momentum to MySpace and Facebook because of its initial implementation in Java JSP. By the time of its rewrite in PHP, MySpace had become the "in place", followed fairly quickly by Facebook (while MySpace foundered under Newscorp ownership).
You don't hear about the failures because they rarely get enough traction to be popular (and if they got traction then typically investors will pour money in to keep the startup afloat).
Also many survivors of such startups are under NDAs which mostly serve to protect the management teams.