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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!"
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.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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?
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?
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.