Friendster Strikes Back!


AS WE KNOW! Friendster is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.The service allows users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users may share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network.

Friendster has over 115 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors a month globally. The website receives approximately 19 billion page views per month, and is in the top 500 global websites based on web traffic.

Over 90% of Friendster's traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network.The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States, Singapore, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India.

Friendster was founded by computer programmers Jonathan Abrams and Cris Emmanuel in 2002 in Mountain View, California before the creation, launch and adoption of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.[11]
Friendster was founded to create a safer, more effective environment for meeting new people by browsing user profiles and connecting to friends, friends of friends and so on, allowing members to expand their network of friends more rapidly than in real life, face-to-face scenarios.[3]
Friendster.com went live in March 2003 and was quickly adopted by three million users within the first few months.[3] Publications including Time, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, US Weekly and Spin wrote about Friendster's success and the founder appeared on magazine covers and late-night talk shows.[3]
Today, Friendster has a membership base of more than 115 million registered users and continues to grow, especially in Asia.[9][10][11]
In August 2008, Friendster hired ex-Google executive Richard Kimber as the CEO.[12][13][14] Kimber is focusing on Friendster's expansion in Asia.[15]
On December 9, 2009, it was announced that Friendster has been acquired by MOL, a Malaysian company.[16]
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Now, you know all about friendster.Then, let see what's new on friendster!
  1. New Brand
    At the center of Friendster's new identity is an energetic logo symbolizing fun, personalization and individuality among youth. It's an important visual identifier for the brand, crafted from a single line and ending in a Friendster smile, creating Friendster's new wordmark. It represents the brand's personality - fun, creative, friendly and personal. The Friendster wordmark is housed within a green "word cloud." The word cloud represents communication within a community, and truly depicts the essence of Friendster's core user base. The new branding will also include a new tagline: "Connecting Smiles." This tagline is Friendster's unique brand promise and portrays what drives Friendster as a company and what the brand means to its users--simply put, it represents the youth enjoying themselves with their friends.


  2. New Web Site
    Building on Friendster's position as a leading social network, the redesigned site is a clean, simple approach to sharing, communication and self-expression. The new design also places emphasis on those features that are favored by the Friendster community--like shoutouts, profile personalization, photo sharing, games, finding friends, and messaging. Every user's logged-in homepage includes a redesigned network activity Stream and Shoutout publishing box, making it easier to keep track of everything friends are doing, what content is being shared, what new photos have been uploaded and more. Each user also has a new Shoutout history page called the Shoutout Stream, where Shoutouts are aggregated, allowing users and their friends to view historical Shoutouts, especially the ones they missed when they were originally posted.

    The new site is designed to be colorful, fun and easy to use. The global site navigation bar and Friendster logo are in vibrant, bright green although users can select their own color theme for their homepage and their site-wide navigation bar at the top of every Friendster page. Given the importance of customization to the users the user profile page has been enhanced and redesigned, optimized for profile skins and themes from Friendster's directory of skins or a user's own images, designs and colors. In addition to the home and profile page, many of the popular pages have been redesigned to simplify the site experience, including the friends, messages, comments, photo browsing, and photo uploading pages. The primary features on these pages have been optimized for usability, putting all the features Friendster users love right at their fingertips, with games now available through the 'Fun' menu on the Navbar.


  3. New Product Launches
    • The Friendster Wallet is a new micro-payments platform that allows users to purchase products and services on Friendster such as virtual gifts, and to send and receive money to one another. The Friendster Wallet enables users to store account balances and supports a variety of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments. Moving forward, Friendster will enable users to make purchases surrounding online games and other offerings. The Friendster Wallet is powered via a partnership with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL)*, a leading payments provider leveraging a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels worldwide.
    • The Friendster Gift Shop enables the Friendster community to send virtual gifts to one another, quickly and conveniently. Friendster Gifts are used to send personal gestures of kindness, celebrate significant accomplishments, and recognize friends and family on special days, like birthdays, or just for fun. A variety of gift themes are supported and more will be added over time. Currently, users can choose from virtual birthday gifts, collectible gifts, greeting gifts, premium gifts, romance gifts, seasonal gifts, thank you gifts and more.
    • Friendster Games is an online games destination, which will offer Friendster users a wide variety of fun, entertaining games and applications to play online with their friends. Building on the games already available on the site (through the 'Fun' menu on the Navbar), users will be able to easily search and bookmark the games they like to play. Game developers will be able to incorporate The Friendster Wallet into their games, allowing them to participate in the Friendster micro-payments ecosystem.
"We look forward to delivering a great user experience and continued product innovation surrounding our new brand and web site. We have a lot coming in the weeks ahead - this is only the beginning," said Kimber.

So, did you want to try the new friendster?
and How about your opinion?
Hope this information helpfull, happy blogging with me :)

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