Longstanding social networking site Friendster has completed its long-promise to reboot with a focus on social games. The platform is going into action this time using the tagline “living the game” and features several dozen games. Games that include a single-player, multiplayer and, kicking it up a notch or two, flashed-based MMOs. The new game site even offers an API that allows developers to bring their web games over to the network. That means more fun for everyone!
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You may find it hard to believe that there was a social networking platform before MySpace and Facebook. It’s called Friendster, a pioneering social networking website for consumers. In 2002, it was launched and attracted tens of millions of users over the years. However, the platform with the catchy name never grew to become the online social network it should have been.
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Where can you not buy a virtual teddy bear these days? Now Friendster’s hawking pixels, too. Friendster says selling virtual gifts, goods and games is a “proven” revenue model in Asia, where 90% of their audience lives. For China’s part, online gaming revenue grew nearly 40% in the second quarter of this year to $906 million, according to CNET. Recession? What recession?

If you think your special brand of virtual ice cream, squirrel, martini, or teddy bear topped with shiny crown and clutching bright red balloons — how’s that for value added? — would tempt users to open their “Friendster Wallets,” hang tight for their third party payments API.
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New office locations include Singapore and Sydney, Australia, which is where Friendster’s CEO Richard Kimber will be based along with the new hires for marketing and business development. Given its proximity to the Asia Pacific, it’s not entirely surprising to see Friendster establish central executives in Australia. The U.S. global headquarters, however, are now in Mountain View, CA, where some executives and cross-department employees will remain. Looking towards the rest of the year, Friendster has made it quite clear that it will be focusing a great deal of attention on the Asia offices, where at least 80% of the company’s new hires will be based.
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So far, Friendster is being pretty tight-lipped about its intended use of its new patent, and there’s only so much we can conjecture based on the patent’s name and the brief description of “scoring the compatibility between two members of a social network based on their interests and scoring the correlation between two interests for a given member of a social network.”
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This appears to be the first use of Facebook’s open-source platform offering that they released earlier this year. It appears that launching your Facebook application will be as simple as requesting a new API Key from Friendster. Developers can learn more by visiting http://www.friendster.com/developer. This is a big win for Facebook who has decided to avoid the OpenSocial standard for the time being, instead choosing to focus on expanding their existing platform offerings.

In addition to choosing not to use OpenSocial, Facebook has decided to launch Facebook Connect instead of partnering with Google on their Friend Connect product. While none of the distributed login services offered by any of the platforms have been successful at spreading, Facebook and Google have been extremely slow in rolling out their new services.

While Bebo was the first to implement Facebook standards for applications, Friendster is the first to release Facebook support using their open-source platform. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues to other social networks. This is a big announcement for both Friendster and Facebook.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In contrast to Facebook’s 30,000 plus applications, Friendster has only 569 applications. That’s not to suggest that the applications are not being used though. According to Friendster’s own statistics, “over 10 million unique users have added ‘apps’” since the launch of the platform last year. While less significant than some of the larger platforms, this is still a substantial number.

Monetization will continue to be a challenging issue for Friendster though given that their primary demographic is southeast Asia and the majority of advertising dollars are spent domestically. Whether or not the company is generating substantial revenue, the company has been able to expand its reach in Asia where the competition continues to heat up.

This is the first news to come out of the company since they announced a new CEO and $20 million in funding.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Currently the company has over 75 million registered users but the Asian market for social networks is still in its early phase. There is increasing competition from both local start-ups as well as Facebook and MySpace who have both made significant strides in Asia to expand their presence. So will Friendster rise to become the largest Asian social network?

Possibly. They have a significant lead over competitors and they continue to grow rapidly in Friendster. The business model in Asia is significantly different though since advertising spending abroad is substantially less than in the United States. Many of the competing social networks generate a large portion of their revenue from virtual gifts rather than advertising.

What’s clear is that the Asian market for social networks has yet to play out. Over the coming years we will see fierce competition where a number of large players have substantial war chests and sizable traction. For the time being it looks like Friendster will continue their upward momentum in the region.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Facebook opened their translations application to the general public and earlier this week MySpace’s latino portal exited beta. Social networks (or social platforms if you prefer) have realized that the largest players will most likely remain as large players for the long term. While there will be slight adjustments, the odds of a Facebook or MySpace crumbling overnight is highly unlikely as there are now dedicated user bases that have put in substantial time to build up their profiles.

Just as the internet has global appeal, so do social networks. They are currently the most effective tool for connecting the masses and are also transforming the way that society interacts with one another. Just as in the offline world, languages will continue to be a barrier to communications but photos and videos will continue to help cultures merge together. I continue to believe that social networks are the most effective platform for spreading values and ideas.

Over the next 6 months look for lack of language support to become a thing of the past as all the social networks become multi-lingual.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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The problem about blocked sites is that several schools, colleges and other institutions or offices are blocking access to popular websites because they think it is waste of time and people can do better things in that time. Maybe they are right but thats not the point – if you want to visit some website you should have possibility to do it.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.