Where Are They Now: Friendster Edition

Good old Friendster!  For those of us old enough to remember the first social network but young enough to have actually wanted to participate in social networks in 2003, it holds a permanent place in our hearts. 

It was the first place many of us experienced the strangely ephemeral pleasure of getting a request from a long lost friend, or the more egocentric kick of methodically boosting our friend count to meaningless levels.  It was the birthplace of the verb "to friend" -- which as we know was a poor development for the more senior noun. 

Friendster, to borrow a piece of its PR lingo, began as an experiment which grew into a company, which became an industry.  Only thing was, while the industry was exploding, Friendster was imploding. It more or less vanished from the scene in 2005.

So then: Where have all the Friendsters gone?

To get the answer, start digging a hole, and don't stop. Or just read the rest of the post.

As Jeff Roberto, Friendster's head of marketing, told me over a soda at the SXSW Hilton, the site has quietly become huge in Southeast Asia. The region accounts for 85% of its 35 million monthly unique visitors. Fully 11 of Friendster's top 15 countries are in Asia, with the Philippines supplying 39% of its total traffic, and Indonesia and Malaysia kicking in 40%*.

You can get Friendster in Japanese, Korean and two versions of Chinese and Indonesian. So if you add English to that you've got, you know, like 66% of the world's population covered.

(Friendster Marketing director Jeff Roberto's profile in Chinese)

Does Friendster have a shot at re-infiltrating the U.S. social network market?  To quote an eye-rollingly overused SXSW cliche, "I forgot to pack my crystal ball."  But put it this way: Grabbing U.S. market share from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and the hundreds of other networks that have sprung up since Friendster would take a lot of very good ideas.

It's in that department that the site is still lagging.  Roberto told me about F-ster's new slate of features, and the thing is, it reads more like Facebook's old slate of features: a platform for app makers, a way for artists or organizations to build  "fan" pages, and a way for people to connect with schoolmates (Facebook's 4-year-old founding idea).  In China's this stuff might be new, but back home it's not much to Friend home about.

*Traffic stats from Alexa.com