Depending on who you ask, Google+ is either growing at a good pace, struggling, or being fitted for a toe tag as its shoved into a large metal cabinet in the coroner's lab. But whats not in question is the ultimate fate of the following social network sites, which either were once at the top of their game or disappeared completely with few remembering they even had a URL.
iTunes Ping
Steve Jobs introduced iTunes Ping as 'sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunesbut Ping is not Facebookit is not Twitter.' And with that resounding, confusing launch iTunes Ping let people follow artists, see what music their friends were buying, what concerts they were attending, and what music people with similar tastes like them were into on iTunes. But unlike Facebook and Twitter (which it definitely was not like but was sort of like in that people like those sites), people didnt want to hang around iTunes. They just wanted to buy their music and leave, sort of like a store in which youre ashamed to be seen walking out with beef jerky or porn. Two years later the social site was closed and integrated into Facebook and Twitter, which it was like but definitely not like, and now is indistinguishable from either.
Eons
Like a retirement village that freaks out whenever a teenager appears and where everybody is still having trouble with the play button on their VCR that they dont realize is now useless, Eons.com was designed as a social site for people 40 and over. The business theory was that kids and adults would each want their own hangout online, only for the company to discover baby boomers and aging Gen Xers don't always want to be reminded how old they are by just complaining about ailments with other people their own age. So the adults went to join the kids at Facebook, which caused the kids to leave Facebook for Kik, and left Eons.com sitting alone in the dark, trying to remember if it took its pills.
Yahoo! 360
Nothing spells early doom then when your site's one and only logo prominently features the word 'beta' in it. Its like a restaurant sign that reads, Yes, were open, but please dont order anything more complicated than water. Which was odd since the original idea behind the social network Yahoo! 360 was that it could do EVERYTHINGconnect with friends, create websites, maintain blogs, message people, share photos, and even provide updated summaries on what everyone else was doing. Its like a restaurant sign that reads, "You want barbecue? You want vegan? You want a lobster shoved inside a condor? Come on in!" Bit apparently all that proved too much for the cooks at Yahoo! 360 and the site never officially opened to the public, like a restaurant sign that reads, 'Were Open' right above a giant padlock that was installed the very first day of business.
Bolt
While Eons.com tried to interest your grandparents in logging online for reasons other than being confused by Skype, Bolt was geared exclusively to teens. One of the earliest social networking sites - coming online 1996 - Bolt offered an age appropriate environment with a focus on music, chats rooms, message boards, e-cards, and even horoscopes. But like a teenager who wants to do whatever it takes to remain popular, Bolt kept changing its look, identity, and probably the way it signed its name. Starting with its official 'American Idol' message board, the site started focusing more on sponsors than its users. Then it transformed into a video music site, which in turn was hit with lawsuits from music companies saying the videos were being pirated. Then it transformed yet again into a content creation site, but by then few users were still around. And so like a teenager who tried to hard to be liked, Bolt found itself alone, muttering how it never really needed friends anyway.
SixDegrees.com
'Let's make social networking a confusing, relentless ordeal!' So might as well have been the concept behind SixDegrees.com, which would have enjoyed far greater success if it were just about Kevin Bacon. Users could list friends, family, and acquaintances (read: people who rarely return your calls and pause a moment before remembering your name) who were both members of the site and not. Users could post on the pages of those people who were in the first to third degree range (from 'closest' to 'I owe him a lunch'), and then see who those members were connected to, a model that was perfected by MySpace and Facebook before being mildly botched by Google+. But like most sites on this page it was pushed aside for far more successful social networks, and now it just quietly reminds itself that the best way to win at 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' is to never forget he was in 'A Few Good Men' and 'Apollo 13.'
Friendster
Friendster is like that really close friend in elementary school who still wanted to play with action figures in middle school, so you gradually shifted to your cooler friend MySpace. But after a while it became obvious MySpace was never going to grow up and stop telling fart jokes, so then you eventually became friends with the very popular and very rich kid Facebook. But several years later you and Facebook have fallen into a comfortable rut and you begin to wonder whatever happened to your best childhood friend. So you reach out only to find that your innocent grade school chum Friendster has desperately reinvented itself into an off-shore gaming site, and you wonder if things would have turned out differently if you had just been there for it all those years ago.
SOURCE: http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=98212
