Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose in 2007. Courtesy of Abrams

Facebook, with more than 250 million active users, and Twitter, the fastest-growing social network, might be all the rage right now.

But they have to give props to Friendster, the social network that paved the way and contributed many of the key concepts behind online connections.

Before the founders of a little-known social network called ConnectU cried foul about Facebook stealing its ideas, MySpace was replicating then-top network Friendster, according to Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams.

"I don't think there's anyone who has had their stuff copied more than me," Abrams said over lunch in San Francisco recently.

In a previous post on our interview with Abrams, he credits himself with the creation of the friend request system, a vital piece of the online social networking puzzle. But he soon learned that being first doesn't necessarily mean you'll come out on top.

Work on Friendster began in 2002. The site launched in March 2003 and by autumn, it had more than 2 million users requesting and accepting friendships and filling out personal profiles. The company was experiencing extraordinarily fast growth and was having trouble keeping up, Abrams said.

To fund the ballooning beast, Abrams sought funding from venture capitalists and secured enough to keep the ship afloat -- for a while.

Within a few months of a successful fundraiser, Abrams was ousted as chief executive. He didn't say whether the heave-ho had anything to do with the $30-million buyout offer he turned down from Google. But over the next two years, Friendster had four different people at its helm and a host of problems inside and out.

"I actually stuck around through 2004 and 2005, trying to help Friendster," Abrams said.

The problems were beyond his control. Coping with the torrent of growth in 2004, Friendster replaced the shaky computer systems that had been running the site with "worse technology," Abrams said.

Meanwhile, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, founders of MySpace, had built a competing product that ...