I’ve came across this site ShowOrNot for some times now, and it seems this site is gaining momentum slowly. Apparently, from the whois record of the site’s domain name, it is a one-man project from Malaysia and there are lot of Malaysian Chinese visiting to this site regularly. Most of the videos found on the site are their favorites, and was considered to be evidence that ShowOrNot is the one-stop video site for Malaysian, more favorite than YouTube, at least for them, albeit that this site is much away of the attention that YouTube attracted.

On this site, you’ll come across users’ profiles, mostly Malaysian Chinese, their brief backgrounds, videos that they uploaded, i.e. in the My Gallery, and friends they made on this site. ShowOrNot also provided sections such as “todays’s hightlight,” “most watch,” and “Top Ranking.” To some Malaysian, they like this site because the videos uploaded there are those filtered by their friends. There’s a saying that friends are all alike, those videos shared there are the favorites among all the South-East Asian people.

Until today, YouTube was still the most popular video sharing site on the Web, but many of the South-East Asian retained fondness for this site. It showed that the world is much bigger than what we thought it was, and there are several small sites that started to carve out their own niches in their respective countries. Look at Friendster, there are more people talk about Friendster in Asia South than Facebook or MySpace. I even read on the Web that some people coined this site as “Friendster + YouTube = ShowOrNot.” Why don’t they mentioned, “Facebook or MySpace + YouTube = ShowOrNot?”

Friendster, who already conquered the Southeast Asian countries in online social network activities, is launching the Japanese and Korean version of its site. The initiative is another example of Friendster moving aggressively into the Northern side of Asia, Japan and Korea since it launched its Simplified Chinese version in October this year. With these two new additions, Friendster is now available in English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

This type of language venture of Friendster is something sets it apart from other successful social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Friendster is focusing on Asian countries, and each different country represents different types of markets. For example, China is developing and very competitive, whereas Japan and Korea are two developed countries, while Singapore is competitive, Philippines and Malaysia are relatively stagnant, and Indonesia is a huge market waiting for them to tap in. They knew if they can make it big in all of the Asian countries, they can avoid to face tough competition in the U.S. market, and if they lose out in one single market, it’ll not affect their total market share in Asia at all.

Last month, I did posted a post on the Friendster’s developer program, and now the Friendster widget directory is available for its users to integrate to their profiles. I can’t tell how easy the widget could be embedded onto the profile since I do not own a Friendster account. However, the widget concept has recently been understood that its presence is “good for the users.”

As of present, there are eight (8) widget categories for one to chose from, namely Slideshows & Photos, Just For Fun, Entertainment, Games, News & Information, Sports, Video and Music. Each category has listed the widgets for users to add onto their profiles, and the widget selected will then apply to a hidden box underneath the “More About User.” Currently, companies that developed the widgets are Slide, RockYou, Jangl, imeem, and etc. Though the Friendster widget directory hasn’t been officially announced, but there are few Friendster rabid users have embedded Slide’s Slide Shows onto their profiles.

Would the presence of widgets be most valuable as part of a larger social networking site? However, in my own viewpoint, there wasn’t a perceived need for such the widgets by the South-East Asian people, because it was unlikely that the users would customized their own profile and try to make their profiles stand out from that of others.

Today Friendster has announced the launched of its developer program that will go live in this November. This move is in tandem with its third stage of opening the Friendster global social network, and now the developers can access the initial set of APIs and the testing environment in developing the widgets. It also means the developers can now have more than one month to build and integrate their widgets with Friendster before they are published to the “Friendster Widget Directory” on November 30.

Though Friendster was one of the social networking sites on the Web, it is not the first that released this kind of “widget directory,” the first was Facebook, and now MySpace, Friendster and several others are also evolving in this direction. However, Facebook temporarily is the only one with a credible claim to being a social platform. This definitely gives Facebook an edge that they are the first-mover, however first-mover does not equal to the first-mover advantage, as the advent of competition creates pressure on the profit margins of first-mover. In real example, 50 million users that Friendster owned is not small, and it’s surely outnumbers the 46 million users that currently used Facebook. And don’t forget, these are two different groups, Facebook was building its empire around the US market whereas the majority of Friendster users are reside in Southeast Asia countries.

What sets this Friendster’s Developer Program apart from others is the focus on getting developers developing the widgets that are easily be deployed to the Friendster’s user profile, without requiring them to build a totally new application. While existing widgets that based on HTML and Flash will continue to function, and a widget directory will be available that let the Friendster users to browse, discover, preview, and add the widget they like onto their profiles. Meanwhile, Friendster plans to adopt the open revenue model in which developers do not need to pay Friendster a portion of money they earn out of their widgets. Moreover, the viral support, i.e. when adding a widget, this will appear in the “My Network Activity” module which will virally promote a particular widget to the user’s friends and the developer community feedback pertaining to additional API calls will be added when this program fully launched in November.

Last November, I did posted a post that entitled, “Friendster still popular?” discussed about the rise of Friendster in Southeast Asia. Now that Friendster has launched its Simplified Chinese version, and their goal and reason is very simple: to provide extra service to the Chinese people that reside especially in Malaysia and Singapore. Generally, Simplified Chinese character is designed for the use of China, Malaysia or Singapore Chinese people that learned and read Chinese character and as a result to promote literacy. When you buy a Chinese newspaper printed in China, Malaysia or Singapore, mostly there are in Simplified Chinese character.

Since Friendster has experienced astonishing growth in Southeast Asia, the only objective this Simplified Chinese version is to encourage more Malaysia and Singapore Chinese educated people start using Friendster as their major social networking tool. As I visited some of my Malaysian or Singaporean friends’ Friendster profile, there are written in English, the foray into the Chinese educated market is becoming the next goal of Friendster in Southeast Asia countries.