Friendster Going Strong In Asia, Maybe Soon In Court

Dekortage writes "Remember Friendster? Long ago outrun and lapped by MySpace and Facebook, and a textbook case of social networking collapse, Friendster appears to be going strong in Asia, and has recently stolen Google's Asia chief for its new CEO. More ominously, though, a recent press release (PDF) notes that the company 'was the first social networking company to launch key features, including the social graph server, a network activities tracker, and more. Friendster has been granted three fundamental patents and has more patents pending.' Hello, lawyers!"

Stupid patents aside

[daveatneowindotnet]

You'll be hard pressed to make me shed a tear if Facebook and MySpace are sued out of existance

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you don't have alot of friends.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, because those 631 friends on your MySpace are really great buddies

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone sounds bitter.

Re:

[daveatneowindotnet]

Not sure why you posted AC, even I thought that was funny

No!

[thermian]

Facebook has got me closer to getting a date then anything else on the internet!

Oh wait, did I just hit submit?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

facebook didn't but slashdot will

bearly looking man in this 40s is looking for a good time. i am built like an elephant. might need some extra shaving though.

Re:No!

[thermian]

cannot unread...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

facebook didn't but slashdot will

bearly looking man in this 40s is looking for a good time. i am built like an elephant. might need some extra shaving though.

CowboyNeal, is that you?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that I don't appreciate the contributions to software that MySpace and Facebook have done, but I applaud this turn of events, because there are a number of underpaid trial lawyers who need to make a buck.

Re:speaking of has-beens and never-will-bes...

[Affenkopf]

Nope, it hasn't. Orkut is the number one social networking site in Brazil and India, so Google is probably still making money with it.

Re:speaking of has-beens and never-will-bes...

[owlnation]

Presumably the success of Orkut in those countries is due to the simple fact that Orkut isn't as a stupidly lame-sounding name as it is in English.

Or are Google's Marketing droids still in beta?

Re:

[TedRiot]

And in Finland 'orkku' is a slang word for orgasm, plural of which is 'orkut'. And amazingly we are a Facebook-nation anyway.

I have no facts about Brazil or India, but the above about Finnish is an actual fact.

Re:

[alexgieg]

I'm from Brazil, and no, orkut doesn't mean or sound like our equivalent for "hot sex". It sounds like nothing actually. If anything, the feel is that of a typical meaningless foreign brand name.

Re:

[Lord Haw Haw Haw]

Orkut, going strong. yes. Making money? no way.

If I as a publisher am not making money runing Adsense. Noway is google making money on orkut.

General purpose social networks, the way they are structured currently will *never* make money over an extended period of time.

Sure there is hype now, ever joker of marketing manager wants to do something on *social media*, widgets and dump traditional marketing. Ironic. Coz three years ago when I was trying to sell them internet, they'd laugh in my face. B

Re:

[Lord Haw Haw Haw]

oh! an ad hominem attack. that's original. I suppose on slashdot you can't expect any better. I suppose u think Slashdot a site to show your language prowess eh.

Well anyway, i was referring to the 130 million page impressions a month that my company is giving to Adsense...

Now go and curl up in a corner... Joker

Re:

[Amitz Sekali]

umm.. I believe friendster in Indonesia make lots of money, especially from cellphone providers ad, which naturally benefit from any kind of social network to gather more subscribers, because intra-provider call is very cheap. One provider actually only charge 0.01 cents per each call. You read that right. It's in decimals, it's in cent, and it's per call initiated.

Re:

[stephanruby]

Nope, it hasn't. Orkut is the number one social networking site in Brazil and India...

I can't be sure because the article is not that quite straightforward, but I don't think they counted India as part of Asia.

:)

Besides, they're not claiming to have the most traffic in Asia, they're claiming to have the third largest traffic figures in Asia -- whatever that is supposed to mean. But to be fair, this article offers very little of substance in terms of statistics -- it reads more like a badly written press re

Re:

[cervete]

Both nieces in Philippines using it for years. It was always huge there. And, it's still growing. Lots of Thai people, too.

so you're saying...

[deathtopaulw]

Friendster is the perfect place to grab a hot asian girlfriend? I see a social networking un-collapse in their future.

Re:so you're saying...

[PPH]

Friendster is the perfect place to grab a hot asian girlfriend?

[Sigh.] Yet another market we've surrendered to the Chinese.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Friendster is the perfect place to grab a hot asian girlfriend?

[Sigh.] Yet another market we've surrendered to the Chinese.

Surrendering the hot Asian girlfriend market implies that we had a hold of it in the first place.

I had a hold of it last night.

What is it for?

[porcupine8]

I could never quite figure out what you were supposed to do on Friendster, other than leave testimonials. At least on Facebook you can play games against your friends and communicate in a few different ways. Maybe Friendster has expanded, but it just seemed like a contact list to me.

Re:

[larry bagina]

hook up.

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[MMInterface]

Basically the same thing you did on Mysapce, notes, groups, hook up. They were slow to upgrade but by the time Facebook came along they had already expanded. Friendster really couldn't handle increasing traffic well at a key time during their growth and they limited people to personal networks when myspace didn't. Once the masses hit all the real benefits of myspace were gone. I liked facebook better because of the cleaner interface but all those stupid games are making up for the benefits. A page full of

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Friendster was useful at one point as a means for meeting people with similar interests. Then they killed all the "fakester" accounts which basically killed most of the reason for having a Friendster account. But before that, it was a good way to connect with other people.

And there wasn't anything to do on Friendster, but that was kinda the point. Go online, meet people and then do actual activities in person with those people you met. Some people actually prefer actual human interaction to the faux interac

Doesn't need to be fancy

[TheLink]

I thought all these sites are mainly for people to:

1) Show off their plumages, tails and strut/dance/whatever so that they can attract potential mates.
2) pick lice off/play with their friends fur and so strengthen bonds. :)

Offtopic, but I want to put this down

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I wonder if it is possible to patent a process for maximizing the number of patents and the scope of those patents for a particular invention.

Re:

[symes]

Yes, thanks, I've called it the auto-patent-maximizer(c).

Re:

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Ah, copyrighted too! I imagine you used the patented process to procure that as well ;)

Re:

[DanJ_UK]

Patent pending.

What is this

[holychicken]

"social networking" of which you speak? Is that like when I post stupid comments on slashdot?

New Motto

[greymond]

People don't like us...Sue until they have too!

Re:

[glittalogik]

That racism is why you're ronery...so very rooonery... [/space-cockroach]

Regional social networks, not new

[Haoie]

Not that unusual. For example, Neoxepia [sp?] is very popular in Canada, while hi5 is popular in Latin American countries.

Re:

[Parham]

I'm from Canada, and I can honestly say I've never heard of http://www.nexopia.com/ [nexopia.com] (I think this is what you meant). In Canada, it seems that we had a shift from Friendster to MySpace/Facebook... or maybe, that's just what happened in southern Ontario. I remember one other one that was popular for a little while was http://meetmeinto.com/ [meetmeinto.com], and that quickly turned into a site for clubbers to chat and talk.

I knew it...

[antique future]

All your friend are belong to us...

Friendster do is better

[crf00]

I'm a Malaysian, and I study in Singapore. I have both Friendster and Facebook account. Last year most of my friends were still in Friendster only, and so did I. This year, most of my friends have accounts on both side.

I would still prefer Friendster than Facebook. The interface in Friendster is so much simpler. When you see one's profile page, it is a page full of description from him/herself. I can see directly what does this person look like, have quick access to his/her photos and list of his/her friends. Much of the space below the profile page is occupied by self description written by that person, and that is the key thing for him/her to reflect what he/she wants other to know about themselves.

Finally, there are testimonials which are similar to the wall in Facebook. Some people's testimonials are full of fancy pictures such as "friends forever", but I'm glad that the pollution in Friendster is not so much compared to Facebook, part of the reason being there is no automatic mechanism to send testimonial to everyone in your friend list. There are some extra things that you may find in a profile page, such as applications add-on, css decoration and media box. But to me they are just clone of Facebook and none of them interest me.

Compare Friendster's profile page to Facebook, what do I see in Facebook? One small picture on the left, few details of personal information, followed by a mini-feed which tells about useless updates. Then a bunch of junks about who is the hottest, games, pets thingy and whatever more you can think of. The wall in Facebook is pretty much hidden, replaced by SuperWalls where all inside are rubbish forwards which spread like virus in one click. In the end what do I know more about this person? Effectively none.

I like the KISS design of the old profile page in Friendster. It has so much less rubbish than in Facebook. A profile page should be a page to let people know more about you, not to let random people play games with each other. I don't care how you guys in US think about Friendster, because I believe that one day Friendster will stand strong and get pass Facebook. Facebook is just a hype and one day it will burst with other social bubbles just as what happened in dot-com boom.

Re:

[anshumani]

Well, I'd like to say the same thing about Orkut. Simplicity above everything else! Not all the rating friends, comparing people, and all the wannabe hype that makes up the mess that is Facebook! I'm from India, so its supposed to make sense that I like orkut............apparently!

So is Yahoo!

[the_arrow]

Well so is Yahoo! My Asian wife and all her friends and relatives only use Yahoo! messenger and Yahoo! mail. And Friendster of course.