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| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Sydney, Australia |
| Key people |
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| Website | www.friendster.com |
| Alexa rank | 167[1] |
| Type of site | Social network service |
| Advertising | Banner ads, Contextual ads, Sponsorships |
| Registration | optional |
| Available in | English, Tagalog, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Bahasa, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish |
| Launched | March 22, 2002 |
| Current status | active |
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Friendster is a social networking website.[2][3] Its headquarters are in Sydney, Australia.[4] The service allows users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts.[5] The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users may share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network.[5]
Friendster has 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 200 global websites based on web traffic.[6]
Over 90% of Friendster's traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network.[7][8][9][10] The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States, Singapore, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India.[6]
In October 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.
In 2007 Friendster added Fan Profiles, the Friendster Developer Program (open platform) and starting 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.[8][11][12][13]
Fan Profiles: Fan Profiles encompass over 40 different types of "entities"[14] – 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. [15] 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.[5][15]
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. This service is expected to roll out in more countries soon.[12]
Languages: Languages include Filipino, Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.[5] 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.[16] 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.[17]
Over 70% of the world's Internet users can now use Friendster.[18]
Friendster Developer Program: Friendster has been an open site since August 2006 when it first began allowing widgets and content to be embedded in user profile pages.[19] Roughly 39 percent of Friendster's users have widgets on their profile.[19]
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.[19][20]
Friendster was the first to support both the OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform.[20]
Friendster Relaunch: On 10 December 2009 Friendster relaunched its new website with new interface in conjunction with its new financial acquisition by Malaysian Company - MOL Global Pte. Ltd. ( Affiliation with Malaysia Berjaya Group )
Patents: Friendster holds some fundamental online social networking patents:[21][22]
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