Friendster.com
Friendster
Friendster is widely regarded as the original social networking website, established in 2002 and founded by Jonathan Abrams. The age of its members varies from country to country but they are mostly young people in their teens or twenties.
Friendster was a huge social phenomenon almost from the start, drawing in a host of heavyweight investors and prompting Google to offer $30 million for the website in 2003. Friendster was clearly the dominant online social networking service. But things would change quickly in 2004 as Friendster was overtaken by MySpace in April, according to the Nielsen/Net Ratings. Other social networking sites such as Facebook, Yahoo! 360 and Windows Live Spaces have surpassed Friendster as well.
How It Works
Like most social networking websites, Friendster uses the Circle of Friends technique to enable users to network with others in virtual communities.
Users register on the site for free and create their personal profile, listing their interests and preferences and showing their photographs. Members can then correspond with other members through private or public messages.
There are three types of friends on Friendster: 1st degree friends (direct friends), 2nd degree friends (friends of direct friends) and 3rd degree friends (2nd degree friends of direct friends).
Membership
Friendster has over 37 million members in North America, Europe and Asia, especially among the 20 to 30 year old set. It also has a huge following in other regions and among other age groups and the characteristics of users tend to vary from region to region. For instance, in South East Asia, Friendster is much more popular among teenagers compared to young adults, particularly in countries like the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
In recent years, Friendster has also experienced rising levels of popularity among the so-called LGBT crowd or the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community, especially in English-speaking countries.
Industry Developments
In 2003, Abrams turned down an offer from Google of $30 million to sell Friendster which, at the time, was only a year old. Instead, he accepted the advances of a venture capital firm that infused $10 million into Friendster in November that year. However, despite that and despite being the pioneering front-runner in social networking, Friendster failed to capitalize on its early gains.
Overall, Friendster has fumbled its lead in the industry so badly that it ranked a mere 14th among the top social networking sites, according to figures released by online tracker comScore Media Matrix in September 2006. The report showed that Friendster was even behind the fledgling site MyYearbook.com, which was founded in 2005 by a 16-year-old still in high school. Moreover, Friendster had only 1/50th of MySpace's total US-based visitors each month.
Contact
- Friendster, Inc., Kent Lindstrom
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- +1 650 618 2638, Fax: +1 902 749 5429
Address
- 1380 Villa St
- Mountain View CA 94041 US
Additional Information
Languages
- English
- Lenguaje espa?ol
- Traditional Chinese
- Simplified Chinese
- Korean
- Japanese
Related Domains
External Links
- eDomainhunter.com www.edomainhunter.com-Cheap Domain Name Registry and Web Hosting
- Alexa: Friendster.com