An old social networking service that was established in 2002, Friendster had grown to become one of the most popular networks in Asia Pacific today.  In a worldwide analysis, it was found that the top 15 countries accessing Friendster are: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, The US, Singapore, Canada, India, Australia, UK, Hong Kong, Japan, United Arab Emirates, China, Taiwan and Korea.

With all these scenario, it attracted business opportunities but the owners decided to decline buyout offers, even that from Internet heavyweights such as Google.  In 2003, it was reported that Friendster’s management received a USD$30 million buyout offer from Google but declined it.  No reasons were highlighted.

Then in the Fall of 2003, The Wall Street Journal reported that Friendster received investments from former executives of Internet companies, including Yahoo Inc., and raised a whopping USD13 million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital.  Since then, the company has worked to develop a profitable business model.

That year, Friendster’s expansion included a package for Scott Sassa, a former NBC executive, as the new chief executive. With the hire, Friendster appears to be trying to shed its online dating image and to evolve into a media company.  Ideas about new interactive programming on Friendster based on the networking taking place on the site was speculated but the new management at the time, kept mum.  Friendster was also seen defining its initial business model: advertising-backed programming rather than dating-service fees.

Within that era, analysts were not too thrilled with the online scenario as it sounds like a journey back to the good old dot-com days. Despite all the restructure and a new strategy kicking in, in those early years, analysts were skeptical about most social networking firms ever becoming profitable. Social networking is very exciting as a concept but not as a business, was the main feeling towards this sort of ventures.

In today’s day and age, it has been proven that social media is huge and it is definitely not going away.  As the global race heats up, one of it’s closest competitor, Facebook soared at more than 400 million active users worldwide.  There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.  There are more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries for Facebook. There is no question that people continue to gravitate in droves towards social networking and blog sites.

In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site when ranked by total minutes for the month. Analysts recently placed Facebook’s worth at USD$10 billion.

In Malaysia, 80% of affluent Malaysians (those with a household income above RM5,000) use social networking sites.  Report shows strong engagements in the Social Media Malaysia (nearly 3.8 hours per visitor and 22 visits per visitor).  Facebook is however the clear leader in social networking sites in Malaysia with 77% reach of Malaysian web population.

For Friendster, there are more than 115 million members worldwide making it one of the leading global online social network but not the top 5 spots. More than 60 million users visit the Friendster website per month making it one of the most visited websites on the Internet these days.

Then, it attracted the attention of a local home grown Malaysian company, MOL.  The company was founded in February 2000 and later listed on the MESDAQ Market of Bursa Malaysia Securities Berhad under the Technology Sector in December 2003.  It went through privatization by its controlling shareholders in February 2008.

In October 2009, Friendster and MOL entered a global partnership where MOL was appointed to provide an integrated payments platform, as a foundation for The Friendster Wallet and The Friendster Gift Shop, for Friendster’s users.

Friendster’s move was to have access to MOL’s 500,000 payment channels across more than 75 countries worldwide.  Apart from that, MOL is linked to 88 banks in 9 countries worldwide making MOL one of Asia’s fastest growing payment systems in developing nations with over 5,000,000 transactions per month. It’s no easy feat but it also processes more than USD200 Million worth of transactions in a year.  Most importantly, more than 2.9 billion people around the world can easily access their online, virtual and physical payment channels.  With this distribution capability and vast market potential that Friendster could tap on, it makes perfect business sense, …… for Friendster.

Following the acquisition, the operations of MOL and Friendster was combined to create Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network, pairing MOL’s offline retail channel partners and payment platform with Friendster’s large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia.

Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen Online said, “We have seen some very exciting growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space. The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing, or a how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers.” He also remarked  “Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice.”  Friendster needs to be relevant to what the market needs.

If Friendster wants to stay relevant and would like to create an evolution in advertising that would create a two-way conversation with the consumers, Friendster needs to be a part of the user experience and foster social interaction with their target audience.  The challenge is of course, had always been, how to monetize the huge database and build up ARPU.

Ganesh Kumar Bangah, president and chief executive officer of MOL at the announcement of the merger said “The merger with Friendster will continue to transform the social networking industry, combining a highly intuitive and successful social media site and online marketing channel with an integrated payment platform and content network which includes games, goods, gifts, music and video. We are creating a unique company that will be well positioned to provide content to a huge, regional user base, here in Southeast Asia,” said

He also said, “The new combined entity gives Friendster the kind of financial backing, retail distribution, and e-commerce infrastructure that will enable us to accelerate our strategy and create a locally relevant, fun experience for our users in Asia, both on and offline.”

We would like to know how far has this plan gone?  What are the achievements thus far and what are the marketing effort that has been put in place to ensure the success of this merger.

So, have you got Friendster?

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Before that Google threw its hat into the OS arena with Google Chrome OS. In my earlier post, I was not so impressed but others seem to be excited with it.

Now listen…. they want to pick a fight with Facebook and Twitter in the social networking business as well. Google is rumored to be set to release new features on Gmail allowing users to update their status for friends to see as part of a move that sees the search giant embrace social media initiatives popularised by other social networking sites (SNS).

The new service is reportedly similar to the status-bar tools seen on Facebook and Twitter, and will further incorporate photo and video sharing.

This new development – which is widely expected to be formally announced sometime this week – comes one week after Facebook marked its sixth birthday by revealing it has more than doubled its number of users in the last year to 400 million.

Google and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, have recently looked to incorporate social-media services to make their offerings more relevant for users also active on SNS. In October, both Google and Bing announced they would adopt a Twitter function to reflect audiences’ growing interest and trust in social commentary. Microsoft was first to launch its Bing Twitter Search function and further connected with Facebook to offer search results on users’ updated statuses.

Further blurring the lines between search, portals and SNS, Friendster and Yahoo Southeast Asia last month also entered into a multi-year strategic partnership that lets mutual users more efficiently share information.

Now what?

Gmail certainly has a lot of users nowadays because of its simplicity to use. Many users have ditched Yahoo mail because of the clutter of news and other content that Yahoo tried to shove down the users throat. Will this move marked a grave mistake by Google?

As it is, Gmail is already pretty heavy to load with all the complex pageload. On days when the trust-worthy Streamyx typically hit bottleneck speed – one will have to switch to basic-view. Imagine, if status-update and more photo and video is added – can the users cope?

Whatever it is – welcome to the social networking bandwagon, Sir. May I introduce you to your fellow latecomer… Tan Sri Vincent Tan from Malaysia. Please get acquainted!

Update Wed 10 Feb 2010

Here it is! I checked my Gmail account this morning and there’s a new line ‘Buzz’ at the left menu column. Just under the Inbox link. Clicking on the link, it opens up a new Buzz page with a welcoming note that informed me that Gmail has conveniently made me follow 14 other people in my contact list – but for some reason none of them has a reciprocal follow on me. It also tells me that my post on Picasaweb photo services will be automatically posted into my Buzz.

If anyone is concerned about Facebook privacy… by comparison Google has even less care about my say who I want to follow or what I want to share with other people. If earlier, I was saying about how Yahoo shove unwanted content at its Yahoo! mail service… this time Google just shackle me down with forced connections. What if I’m a minor and some of those my contact list is shady characters? (contact list is, by default, automatically added based on your email sent put

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The cheek and arrogance of them. In fact Google executives were reported at the Buzz launch to say that online social networking has become so widespread and disorganized that only Google, with its massive reach and immense computing power, can make sense of it all.

“It has become a core belief of ours that organizing the social information on the Web is a Google-scale problem,” Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager, said at the launch.

Yes… Gmail may have 176 million users. But not everyone is an active user and as I speak, a few people I checked who are inactive registered users, noted that the Buzz component isn’t in their page.

Related articles:

• Google Takes On Facebook, Twitter With ‘Buzz’ (wired.com)
• Microsoft, Yahoo Diss Google’s Buzz (wired.com)
• Facebook is the new threat to Google (guardian.co.uk)
• Google’s Bad Buzz: Microsoft, Yahoo Mock New Social Product (dailyfinance.com)
• Google flexes muscles against social networks (ubergizmo.com)

Thus was born Social Networking phenom which is closely linked to the popularity of terms such as Web 2.0. A ‘new’ internet is borne.

Then other social networking sites such as MySpace Beauty and the Beast trailer and Friendster were born. They were very popular especially among teenagers and celebrities. However, from a dorm room in Silicon Valley, a newer site Facebook came to prominence. Given its lack of customisation options, it was not the obvious choice for teenagers. However, Facebook’s stroke of genius lies in its decision to open up third party developers to develop plethora of apps for Facebook. Together with its own brand of HTML, anybody can develop their own quizzes and more… very soon Facebook became a household internet name.

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What sets FB apart is its business-friendly approach – they make it very easy for businesses to set up custom pages – for free. And more crucially – the ease for businesses to advertise on Facebook – with complete control on the targeting of viewers, on-the-fly editing of advertising and ability to start, pause or stop a campaign.

Out of the blue (pun not intended), came Twitter to prominence in 2006 and a short 3 years later millions of internet users became addicted to this SMS-like brevity of Twitter. The success of Twitter (which is founded by co-founder of a podcasting company Odeo) surprises many media gurus because Twitter does not offer anything much except updating statuses. Anybody can do that right?

The Cycle (aka The Devil’s Ground) dvdrip Becoming Jane Again much of the success of Twitter is the decision to let third party developers use Twitter and make their own applications. So much so that it was said the majority of Twitter user never actually visited Twitter homepage after registration of account. That is also the problem with Twitter because they have not been able to figure out how to make money out of the service. However, a leaked internal document in Feb 2009 indicated that the company ambition is to have 1 billion users which will then make the service a major internet traffic controller which ‘obviously is a serious business’.

The question now is: which social networking sites that you use? Do you have accounts on all 3 – which admittedly I do. But do you spend your time on all 3? – obviously not a practical approach.

Personally, I spend more time on FB rather than Twitter. However, recent changes by Facebook is alienating users. Somehow when I visited my FB wall recently, I find it swamped with less-useful entries. You know what I mean? Can’t really put my finger to what it was yet though – but that is the feeling I get and that’s enough disincentive to check out the site.

I’ve never been a chatter, so Twitter is not for me. To get the best out of Twitter, you need to check the status regularly or you will miss out on the conversation. Unless of course you are a user of always-on handsets like iPhone or Blackberry.

Blogging? Occassionally yeah.. well I blog here but my entries come in spurts. I will try to write more often though. Sorry boss.

For the FB and Tweet addicts, I wonder… did it feel like the world suddenly has no purpose? Tcshk.. so melodramatic.

Both Facebook and Twitter reported that they suffered waves of cyber attacks on their sites last week that caused their services to be disrupted. Apparently it was of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack type and it was orchestrated in 2 waves. The first wave was a spam campaign consisting of e-mails with links back to posts by one of its users. The second and more destructive phase consisted of the denial-of-service attack, which attacked the sites’ servers by sending lots of junk requests to that users’ page.

Therein lies the crux of the issue. The attacks were not directed at these sites themselves but rather to one of their users. Apparently it is politically motivated and was targeted at a blogger who goes by “Cyxymu” — Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi, a city in the breakaway territory of Abkhazia in Georgia. So someone somewhere who hated his (or her) guts attacked his online presence at several Web sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal. In other words these sites are just collateral damage in this political war.

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For most of us, the damage was minimal – if any. These social networking sites are just casual indulgence. But what about organisations that have chosen to use these sites as crucial part of their business? The outages would have caused them losses – just like the losses incurred when our TNB suffered blackouts a few years back.

Surely many have asked, is it wise to put your business reliance on this fragile online facilities? Will it be safer to do business offline – face-to-face the old way? It is easy to agree with this logic. But this is the same argument faced when one decide whether to embrace new things. Like automation of factory against traditional way of doing things. Like computerising your documentation against pen-and-paper methods. Like travelling on air against using road or sea.

But it still is daunting to think that someone could just bomb you when you have done nothing wrong. The thing is – we live in Malaysia where many of these cyber terrorism and physical terrorism are just things that your read happenings elsewhere. It could not happen to me – you think. But a lot of hatred is being sowed – especially online. We might not be so safe anymore…

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