![]() ![]() Note: When I asked Friendster executives about its plans beyond Asia, I got a roundabout answer about Asia’s promise - so I’m guessing Asian users can expect 100 percent of the company’s attention. It plans to translate the site into more Asian languages. Today, it introduced a new version in Malay (see screenshot below), and has also recently added Vietnamese. Regardless of what happens in China, the site has already launched versions in both simplified and traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. (Meanwhile, I hear Facebook is seen by the Chinese government as being about real-world connections - something I’ve argued - real world connections that could foment dissent.) Still, from what I hear, Friendster, like MySpace, is seen by the Chinese government as an entertainment site, not so much a place that foments political dissent. I say “appear” because there is little reliable data about any social networking traffic in China, so I - and many China observers I’ve spoken with - tend to doubt any internal numbers given by companies in the country. Domestic social network offerings from established companies like QQ and younger startups like Xiaonei and 51.com appear to have already grown prohibitively large. Among its international competitors, Facebook is contemplating how to introduce its Chinese-version site without inviting government censorship, and MySpace has been pumping money into its China site.īut life for internet companies in China is especially complicated. Most especially, it is the site’s popularity with Chinese speakers outside of greater China that may be give it a better chance of reaching users in the country. With the site’s recent growth across countries, it may become the go-to social network for large portions of Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore This growth is happening across major Asian ethnic groups. The international friendships between Friendster users appear to be giving it an ongoing boost in Asia, with 23 percent of an average user’s friends located in a different country. But because the site had become popular with many Asian-Americans in the Bay Area during its early days, these users shared the site with family and friends in other parts of the Pacific. to MySpace and Facebook, both of which now dominate the market here. Nearly from the start, it has been wracked by painful internal issues, including management conflicts, investor conflicts, technical problems, and mixed messages to its users about what was acceptable on the site. This is looking more and more like a happy ending for the San Francisco-based company, which, as many of our long-time readers know, has seen many ups and downs over the years. Meanwhile, Friendster users are spending an average of 229 minutes on the site per month, the highest of any social network, according to comScore data from March. Internally, it says it sees range much higher in many countries. Friendster also points out that comScore doesn’t account for users who access the site through internet cafes. That growth rate seems to be increasing, as the company has added 10 million of those users since December. ![]() Friendster, because of its growth in Asia, has seen its user base nearly double from 23 million monthly active users in April of 2007, to 40 million users this past April, according to comScore. ![]()
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