Friendster 1 Friendster Friendster, Inc. Type Private Founded 2002 Headquarters Mountain View, California and Malaysia Key people • Ganesh Kumar Bangah, Chief Executive Officer Owner MOL Global [1] Website www.friendster.com [2] Alexa rank 1000 (June 2011) Type of site Social network service Advertising Banner ads, Contextual ads, Sponsorships Registration Yes [3] Users 8.2 million (June 2010) Available in English, Tagalog, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish Launched March 22, 2002 Current status active Friendster was a social networking website.[4] [5] based in Mountain View, California.[6] The service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts.[7] The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network.[7] It was considered one of the original and even the "grandaddy" of social networks.[8] The service became popular in Southeast Asia and is a major site in that region of the world.[9] In May of 2011, the company repositioned itself into a social gaming site and discontinued user social network accounts.[10] Friendster had over 115 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors a month globally. The website receives approximately 19 billion page views per month, and is in the top 1,000 global websites based on web traffic.[11] Over 90% of Friendster's traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, as of 2008, Friendster had more monthly unique visitors than any other social network.[12] [13] [14] [15] The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, South Korea, Bangladesh and India.[11] Friendster 2 History Friendster was founded by computer programmer Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin in 2002 in Morgan Hill, California before the creation, launch and adoption of MySpace, Facebook, and others.[16] Friendster was founded to create a safer, more effective environment for meeting new people by browsing user profiles and connecting to friends, friends of friends and so on, allowing members to expand their network of friends more rapidly than in real life, face-to-face scenarios.[5] Friendster.com went live in 2002 and was quickly adopted by three million users within the first few months.[5] Publications including Time, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, US Weekly and Spin wrote about Friendster's success and the founder appeared on magazine covers and late-night talk shows.[5] Friendster's rapid success inspired a generation of niche social networking websites including Dogster and Elfster.[17] [18] As of 2008 Friendster had a membership base of more than 115 million registered users and continued to grow in Asia.[14] [15] [16] According to Alexa, the site has suffered an exponential decline in traffic in America since 2009. From a peak 40 ranking it reached 800 in November 2010. Most people have since attributed this decline to the rise of Facebook, a rival social networking site. In August 2008, Friendster hired ex-Google executive Richard Kimber as the CEO.[19] [20] [21] Kimber is focusing on Friendster's expansion in Asia.[22] On December 9, 2009, it was announced that Friendster has been acquired by MOL Global, one of Asia's biggest Internet companies. MOL Global is funded by one of Malaysia's successful businessmen, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, Chairman and Chief Executive of Berjaya Corporation Berhad.[23] Financial history The company was originally founded in 2003 with a $12 million investment by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, and private investors.[5] [24] In 2003, Friendster management received a $30 million buyout offer from Google, which they declined.[5] Friendster received another $3 million in funding in February 2006 led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital.[25] In August 2006, Friendster also received $10 million in funding in a round led by DAG Ventures,[25] and Friendster announced in August 2008 that it had raised an additional $20 million in funding in a round led by IDG Ventures.[4] [26] Prior to its acquisition by MOL Global, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, IDG Ventures and individual investors. Awards and recognitions In July 2006, Friendster is awarded Key Social Networking Technology Patent.[27] In 2007, Friendster is selected by AlwaysOn Media as Top 100 Private Company Award Winner.[28] In April 2008, Friendster becomes Webware 100 winner.[29] In May 2010, Friendster is recognized as one of the "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.[30] Services In November 2009, Friendster announced a global partnership with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL), a leading payments provider leveraging a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels worldwide, to power the Friendster Wallet and a payments platform enabling micro-spending for over 115 million users on Friendster. The Friendster Wallet will support a variety of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments. Friendster 3 In 2007 Friendster added Fan Profiles, the Friendster Developer Program (open platform) and started launching Friendster.com in 9 additional languages. In 2008, Friendster continued to launch the site in new languages and also launched Friendster Mobile which includes SMS text alerts.[13] [21] [31] [32] Fan Profiles: Fan Profiles encompass over 40 different types of "entities"[33] – including artists, celebrities, models, musicians and organizations. Such entities can create a "Fan Profile" which helps them promote themselves and build a fan base on Friendster. Fan Profiles are also accessible to non-Friendster members via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. [34] Friendster users can become fans of their favorite entities and keep up to date on all their latest news. There are over 40 million total fan connections to Fan Profiles on Friendster.[7] [34] Friendster Mobile and Friendster Text Alerts: Friendster mobile (m.friendster.com) is free for users from any web-enabled mobile device and is available globally. Friendster mobile is available in several languages in addition to English (Indonesian, Malay, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese). Friendster users in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines can subscribe to and receive SMS text alerts on their mobile devices for network activity and friend related updates. Languages Available languages include Filipino, Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.[7] Until September 2007, Friendster was only available in English. 10 new languages were added from 2007 up to January 2009, with Filipino being the newest language to be included.[35] Users can also enter content on Friendster in any language. Friendster launched all language support on a single domain - www.friendster.com. Friendster is the first global online social network to support Asian languages and others on a single domain so that users from around the world can talk to each other.[36] Development Friendster has been an open site since August 2006 when it first began allowing widgets and content to be embedded in user profile pages through its developer program.[37] Roughly 39 percent of Friendster's users have widgets on their profile.[37] Friendster gives software developers access to APIs that utilize content and data within the Friendster network to build and deploy customizable applications on and off Friendster. Friendster's Developer Program is an open, non-proprietary platform with an open revenue model.[37] [38] Friendster was the first social network to support both the OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform.[38] On 10 December 2009 Friendster, relaunched its website with a new interface, coinciding with its acquisition by the Malaysian company MOL Global, in affiliation with Malaysia Berjaya Group. Patents Friendster holds some fundamental online social networking patents:[39] [40] • System, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer [41] • Method of Inducing Content Uploads in a Social Network [42] • System and Method for Managing Connections in an Online Social Network [43] • Compatibility Scoring of Users in a Social Network [44] • Method for sharing relationship information stored in a social network [45] In August 2010, Facebook confirmed that it had acquired 18 patents from Friendster.[46] Friendster 4 Site transformation In June 2011, Friendster shifted from social networking site to a social entertainment site which focus on gaming and music. The accounts are unchanged and still existing. However, all the photos, messages, comments, testimonials, shoutouts, blogs, forums and groups that the users may have now no longer be part of the account.[47] An exporting tool is provided to back-up the information of the user account. This tool has an ability to export photos to Flickr and Multiply. References [1] http:/ / www. friendster. com/ [2] "friendster.com - Traffic Details from Alexa" (http:/ / www. alexa. com/ siteinfo/ friendster. com). Alexa Internet, Inc. Retrieved 2011-06-01. [3] https:/ / www. google. com/ adplanner/ planning/ site_profile#siteDetails?identifier=friendster. com& geo=001& trait_type=1& lp=true