Friendster Bought by Malaysian Company, Reveals Totally Asian Branding

By Ernie | Thursday, December 10, 2009 | 5 Comments

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Friendster — seriously, remember them? — is like the Coolio of social networking services; like the rapper, the website was once hip and edgy, but after a series of poor financial decisions is relegated to do desperate things to get the attention of, well, anyone. In Coolio’s case it’s to star on reality shows and make a cooking show on YouTube; in the case of Friendster, it’s a desperate play to keep loyal the one social group on Friendster that has not left Friendster for other networks like MySpace or Facebook in droves: Filipinos, Malaysians and Singaporeans.

Whereas previously, Friendster was branded as just your regular social networking site with a — wink wink, nudge nudge — very Asian fan base, their acquisition by Malaysian company MOL Global yesterday flips that on its head, revealing a branding campaign where Friendster is a friendly, personal site especially for you — if you’re 19-24 year old Filipino living in Asia, of course. The new branding campaign isn’t surprising to anyone who is paid to keep tabs of the social networking industry, but this will be particularly jarring to old members of Friendster, not the least of which includes Asian Americans. (And gay men. And Burning Man attendees. And veteran dot-commers.)

But who cares; you’re too busy taking care of your virtual farm on Facebook, right? Right.

(Full disclaimer: I work in the web industry; more specifically, in the social networking space.)

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routermen

friendster is programmed by people who have less interest in security, which they really need to employ 3rd party vendors to evaluate their security for them , (if that did ever happen). If you feel that giving away your personal information to people you don't even know is a good thing to do , then be my guest.

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routermen

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johnklin

Friendster had many problems, but I don't think financial decisions were the main reason for its downfall.

1. Friendster did not scale - it was a success disaster. Friendster was the first mainstream social networking site, and people signed on like a virus.

2. Ultimately, where Facebook ultimately succeeded was that it had staged rolled outs based on specific self-identified / authenticated college email addresses and domains and socially encouraged REAL identities.

3. & 4. Facebook identified that wall posts & publishing status updates encouraged more usage and Facebook thought of itself and then developed itself as a platform for 3rd party developers to develops applications across the social graph.

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csc3

friendster definitely dropped the ball big time. they were the first player in the social media scene, but got really lazy. not to mention the site was extremely unstable for a good period of time. oh well, see ya.

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