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Last month, internet archeologist, Dr. Maxwell Frey,
stumbled upon the perfectly preserved ruins of an online community called Friendster.
Dr. Frey good morning to you. - Good morning.
Dr. Frey, tell us about this amazing discovery of yours.
Well, it was called Friendster, and at its peak it was a vibrant social network
with more than 50 million members.
- 50 million! - Wow! - That's right.
But then, out of the blue, the civilization just ended
and the site was completely abandoned. - Strange.
One day Friendster users were posting a seemingly endless stream of bulletins about
awesome parties and cool shows and then nothing.
That is so eerie. - Total silence.
Today the ruins of the site remain perfectly preserved as they were
at the time of Friendsters demise, sometime around mid to late 2004 AD.
Wow, their lives just come to a complete stop like a fly trapped in amber.
Exactly.
It's really beautiful. You can see how much work went into it.
Now you just made this amazing discovery
just by looking through an old desktops browser history?
That's right. And as soon as I entered the site,
I knew I was the first human being to lay eyes on those pages in many, many years.
There must be so much to learn from the remnants of this site.
There is. Evidence suggests Friendster users or Friends were a simple people,
spending most of their time gathering the names of bands
to display on large ornamental favorite music lists.
Oh, I'm getting chills just looking at it.
Brand names were important to them just as they are to us today,
but they revered something called Six Feet Under as well as The Shins.
They also prize photos of themselves drinking.
Everyone looks so happy. - Such a mystery.
So what happened to Friendster?
Well, no single explanation is universally excepted,
but some of my colleagues believe that
a computer virus may have wiped out a large portion of the Friendster users,
and then the rest fled their accounts out of fear.
Others believe that Friendster was only meant to exist temporarily
to fill a void left by another mysterious civilization known as ALL,
or perhaps AOL.
Now, if the public is interested, they can go visit the ruins of the website
at www.friendster.com .
All we ask is that they don't alter any content.
They leave the site just as they found it.
Of course. Well, thank you Dr. Frey for being our guest.
Thank you Dr. Frey. - Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Coming up, a new study has linked heart disease
to eating like a big, fat, disgusting pig that no one could love.
Still ahead this hour: How to punch up your boring will.