Friendster goes to Asia

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

While other social networking sites are tweaking and making strides, it seemed liked Friendster wasn't really doing much, and has gotten lost in the conversation with Facebook and MySpace.

Apparently though they're still going strong - with about 58 million users - and about 39% of the site's traffic is coming from the Philippines - which has prompted Friendster (also leading the pack of social networking sites in the Asia Pacific region) to add in more features geared toward their Asian users:

Because of the site’s popularity in Asia, the developers have decided to create more innovations targeted to the Asian market. “We’re coming up with lots of big things,” said Jeff Roberto, marketing and public relations director of Friendster. “For one thing, we’re now offering the site in several languages. We used to be a purely English site, but it’s now available in simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Spanish. That makes for roughly 66 percent of the languages used on the Internet.”
Groundbreaking? Not quite (at least yet). But is it cool that they're embracing their Asian demographic versus just ignoring them?

Definitely.