Friendster was the first social network. It has a long history , but the website friendster.com went dead in 2015 and the company officially shut down three years later in 2018. That’s where this story begins. The domain name friendster.com was registered on March 22 2002. After the site shut down in 2015, the domain did not resolve for 8 years. However, in October 2023 I noticed that the domain name was resolving once again, but it was showing a lot of popup ads. I was curious who owned it, so I looked at the WHOIS info and recognized the owner as a customer of park.io, a company I founded in 2014, and that I had corresponded with him previously over email. I reached out to him and said I was interested to buy the domain. He told me he had bought it for $8k and now was making ad revenue from the existing traffic. He bought it at gname.com, a site that hosts expired domain name auctions where you can buy prerelease domains from various Chinese/Asian registrars.…