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.