Early this year, Time reviewed about Friendster moved to Asia. Though I am bit late for the article (just found it), I think it's lame. Everybody in Asia knows that right after myspace and YouTube, Friendster only hope was Asian. However they decided to fight, and they won the social network patent, but for what?
Last year just before the facebook platform hype, it launched its alternative languages features which was chinese, followed by Korean and Japanese but left out all Southeast Asian users which was (is) biggest portion of registered users. Why chinese? Obviously everyone after China for giant market acquisition. How did they perform? Not well…
Friendster traffic ranks in East Asian and Southeast Asian countries according Alexa:
- China 209
- Japan 256
- South Korea 19
- Hongkong 179
- Macao 59
- Philippines 1
- Brunei 1
- Malaysia 2
- Indonesia 2
- Singapore 5
- Thailand 415
And some other regions:
- Australia 20
- New Zealand 30
- United States 101
- United Kingdom 93
- United Arab Emirate 10
- Qatar 11
- India 367
Data not available for South America and Africa (very few).
Look at the traffic ranks, Friendster already failed in China, Japan and Hongkong. China users already enjoy local social networking like 51.com and qq.com, while Japanese has mixi.com. Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director of Asia Internet Consultancy did not even count Friendster in today competition on an interview by ReadWriteWeb.com.
Even though Indonesian contributes as major traffic since 2004, the option to switch to Bahasa Indonesia lastly provided on March this year, and it is very lousy. Other Languages option provided are Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and English.
How is Friendster doing in its birthland, US? According Quancast, Friendster has about 1,3 million American users. About 40% actively contributes traffic on daily basis while 10% described as addicted users and most are Asian of 25-34 y/o. (I can't access Quantcast for second look due to server maintenance?).
I have been user at Friendster since 2004, and it helped me meet long lost friends and new friends as well. I also enjoyed many other services like blog, gallery and feeds. What I found to be annoying were Friendster seems to easily approved fake profiles, did not do much about spams, and did not response well on user reports and complaints. I also had reported some malicious code on few profile testimonials but never received their response.
They claimed to have 65 user worldwide and growing. I wonder how many of them are fake.
I suggest Friendster, to be more serious to listen to its constituent whatever languages spoken, find it as more opportunities to reveal. Lucky to have OpenSocial but please do more on the developer page. Also, it is important to have local rep while Friendster execs don't understand what their million users talk about.
Sidenote:
- This blog enjoys traffic from thousands queries on google about "cara daftar friendster" (how to sign up on Friendster).
- Today, I check my Facebook on daily basis.
Me serving government and enterprises using NET supercomputers.
Dreams are struggling to exist and we often bury them during our daily activities. People don't understand our dreams, they only think that we up to something. Thus people tend to discourage, misleading and give confusing opinion on how to achieve in certain topic.