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.

An interesting study released by comScore showed that MySpace and Facebook are both not popular in Asian countries, albeit that their growing popularity in the U.S. and Europe. As shown in the below picture, only 8.1% of MySpace’s visitors and 7.1% of Facebook’s visitors are came from Asia-Pacific. Ironically, Friendster, not popular anymore in the U.S. has nearly dominated the whole Asia-Pacific, with 24 million unique visitors in June and 88.7% are from Asian countries.

It was the aggressive moves by Friendster in Southeast Asia that cause its continued popularity. Friendster is doing fantastic well in Malaysia at this moment, where the site has grown through the tie-up with some local pop singers there. Clearly, Asian countries has destined to be the next battleground in the social networking war between these three players I mentioned.

Apparently, when Asian can’t find their friends in MySpace or Facebook, in spite of MySpace and Facebook have a stronger brand, it’s sound no difference. In this case, it was a cultural shock for MySpace and Facebook, and to me, social networking are closely linked to cultural prejudice. For example, you probably can find a group with same language, same ethnic in social networking site. Maybe it’s time for MySpace and Facebook to rethink their market strategy and build the local site to cater to the Asian market.

Source: adapted from http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1555, accessed 31 July 2007.

The other day I came across this Pictogame, a site that allowed users to upload their pictures, and turn their pictures into games and share with their friends. The games created are allowed to embed onto an user’s personal blog, or their Blogger, Friendster, Tagged, Multiply or their MySpace accounts. I can see this site will gain popular in the future based on several reasons here: the game creation process is truly simple, i.e. three steps involved as per their site stated, upload picture, choose a game template, and rotate the direction of the picture as one want. Moreover, this site invented is based on the belief that people nowadays want fun, and one of the funniest things to do is to create game. But I must say this site is very clever, for a new startup, offering the services that targeting at the niche and smaller market is a clever strategy. Maybe I’m wrong, blogging or social networking industry is not small, albeit perhaps the number of services that can be embedded into the social networking sites or blogs are too many to count for.

Below is the sample game that I made on Pictogame. Kick me!

Put this game on your blog   Create your own   More games

It is not a surprise news when a social networking site decided to partner with a local classifieds provider since it happened just a few days ago, Oodle has said in its blog that it has launched a classifieds group on Facebook. Now it’s the Friendster turn. Friendster today has secured a multi-year partnership with OnLine eXchange, both have jointly launched an online classifieds and job listings site for the Friendster users in the U.S., i.e. olx.friendster.com.

I’m not sure what will be the demand for this new product that cater to the Friendster’s users. If we look at the past product rollouts of Friendster, we hardly believe Friendster will venture into the online classifieds field in the marketplace. I thought Friendster will only go into some areas where they capable to register the patent in a particular field that they interested. To note here, Friendster has registered three patents in social networking industry, as follow: 20050235062, 20050021750, and 7188153. As this online classifieds is not a product that new-to-the-world, nor it represented a great value-added service for the existing networks, in addition to the difficulty in predicting the user acceptance, at least in the short-run, why these social networking sites are passionately offering the classifieds services? My sense is that online classifieds platform for the users in the social network sites, these type of products has no benchmark yet. When the existing users do not have any benchmark for understanding as well as using the product, it’s better for Friendster to act as one of the early movers in this brand new field.