Did Friendster fail purely because of technology? Or something else?

Friendster had terrible community management and made serveral missteps to alienate its early adopters.  It was conceived as a dating site but early users created a thriving community of "concept" profiles (historical figures, cities, venues, cultural works) so that users could "friend" these to show different group affiliations.  This created a culture that was very sophisticated and engaged, but didn't fit the founder's vision / business model so one day the "fake" profiles were all arbitrarily deleted (apparently Johnathan Abrams took special pleasure in personally deleting profiles that people made for their pets), which alienated a huge number of users (I was one of them).  Around that time myspace was picking up and everybody bailed, but people weren't happy about the decision.  Server issues were also a problem, but the core community was loyal and sites that own up to their service issues can often still succeed if they have loyal users (like Makeoutclub, which broke down more often than a punk's tour van but had fiercely loyal users). Friendster never recovered the loss of early adopters to myspace, except for maybe a brief renaissance in 2007.  Meanwhile the site became hugely popular among teens in Southeast Asia and eventually, after several product development death spirals, management made a site for the users they had, and dropped profiles altogether to make it a social gaming site for Asian tweens.  it was weird to go on that site in 2010 and see all of the frozen in time  2003 American hipsters stuck in this branding and graphic design for 12yearold gamers.

It's simple, and I know this because my Country, Indonesia was one of the biggest in Friendster.  And now we are number 3 in Facebook :) Friendster failed because simply nobody goes there anymore. This kind of places, just like its real-life counterpart (joints,pubs,market,restaurant, etc), depends on customers.  No customers, no hits, no advertiser, no money. Having said that, maybe Friendster could've reinvented itself, or innovate, trying to differentiate itself against Facebook, like what MySpace is trying to do.