Friendster
 |
|
Screenshot of Friendster's main page, updated in July 2011
|
|
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
|
Type of site
|
Social Gaming |
| Available in | English, Filipino ,Persian, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | MOL Global |
| Key people | Ganesh Kumar Bangah (chief executive officer) |
| Slogan(s) | "Living the Game" |
| Website | www.friendster.com |
| Alexa rank |
 84,444 (September 2015[update]) |
| Advertising | Banner ads, Contextual ads, Sponsorships |
| Registration | Yes |
| Users | 8.2 million (June 2010) |
| Launched | March 22, 2002 |
| Current status | Defunct (as a social networking site) Closed (as a social gaming site) |
Friendster was a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was originally a social networking service website. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original and even the "grandfather" of social networks.
After the relaunch of Friendster as a social gaming platform in June 2011, the number of registered users reached over 115 million. The company operated mainly from three Asian countries: the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, and over 90% of the site's traffic came from Asia. As of 2008, Friendster had more monthly unique visitors than any other social network in Asia. The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 were the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, South Korea, Bangladesh and India. Friendster remained notably popular in Indonesia through 2012.
On June 14, 2015 Friendster, citing "the evolving landscape in our challenging industry" and lack of engagement by the online community, suspended their services.
Friendster was founded by Canadian computer programmer Jonathan Abrams in 2002, before the wider adoption of MySpace (2003), Hi5 (2003), Facebook (2004) and other social networking sites. Friendster was one of the first of these sites to attain over 1 million members, although it was preceded by several other smaller social networking sites such as SixDegrees.com (1997) and Makeoutclub (1999).
...
Wikipedia