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 mean 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. Apparently, Friendster is really hot and growing big in Malaysia and Singapore. Forget about the statistics, for instance, I was asking my contacts there to send me some documents or complete the tasks on time, but some of them never meet the deadline, simply giving reasons that they’re too busy or they forgot to put those things into the “to do list,” but they’ll never forget to login their Friendster once on any given day, check their Friendster profile will reveal their activities. Today is no difference, sometimes I wish my contacts know the beauty of work hard, and play hard, but it seems they’re not.

Today Reuters ran an interesting story entitled, “www.sex.asia likely to be Internet domain in demand,” discusses the prospect of dot asia domain business. In fact, the dot asia domain is confirmed to be open for registration started on this October 9. The registration is on the basis that priority registration are limited to registered trademark owners. Apparently, no one will know which name will be the most popular dot asia extension on that day, as individuals, organizations, or the cybersquatters no longer view domain registration or domain parking as a risky business. Instead, they see it as a new opportunity that provide great return.

In the meantime, those who are interested in register the dot asia domain can go to the home page of these dot asia accredited registrars, authorized resellers and affiliates, as found on this page.

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 Asians can’t find their friends in MySpace or Facebook, despite the fact 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.

Joost began its Asian expansion by include the content from i-amtv, after serving up the content from Beauty TV recently. i-amtv, stands for Independent Asian Music Television, with offices in Malaysia and Ireland was the first music channel in Asia. A bold move for Joost and the content included from i-amtv will be available in both on-demand service or as a continuous channel for the Joost users. On i-amtv, users can find artists that feature songs from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, China, Singapore and Indonesia. Initially, only pop, rock, punk, grunge and hip-hop are available, but later Joost will include interviews, concerts, documentaries and user-generated content related to Asian indie music from this Asian music broadcast provider.

“We are planning a full suite of interactive features such as gig listings, social networking tools and band info widgets. As the channel evolves, we intend to push the boundaries of what’s possible on Joost,” said Genervie Kam, i-amtv head of music, according to The Star Online from Malaysia.

The local search engines still dominate the entire South Korea’s Internet market. One of the main search engines in South Korea Naver, formed by NHN in year 1999 continued to play an important role in changing the search behavior of many Korean. Naver, whose name derived from the neighbor and navigator words has the existing 16 million of Korean using its search engine everyday, accounted for 71.08% of South Korea searches in last June. It is not surprise that a search engine that “made in Korea” is leading the search engine race in South Korea, followed by another Korean company Daum.net with 12.05%, Yahoo! South Korea with 5.92% and Google with 1.95%, according to this article. Moreover, the community site of Naver, i.e. Naver Cafe has achieved extraordinary growth, with an increased of 3 million users over the past twelve months, and thus overtook its closest rival Daum.net in the number of visitors to their community services.

It is clearly that both Naver and Daum.net are positioning themselves as portal by choosing the complexity of their user interfaces. Nevertheless, we witness the rise and fall of Yahoo! and Google South Korea, both dropped their market share to less than 10% in South Korea while a year ago, they achieved 32% and 17% market share respectively.

This is a follow-up post of my second post in this blog. It look like a new top-level domain, i.e. dot asia is set to begin from this October, according to a news in Singapore. There are certain phases before the dot asia domain will be available for public registration, but the most interesting part is that the first-come, first-served domain registration model is not welcome at this time. For now, I’m concern about the respond of this new domain in Asia, as dot com domain name has became a successful practice whenever a person or an organization in registering the domain of a particular Website. On the domain industry, if success is measured by the popularity, the early winner and the ultimate winner has been the dot com extension.

There are plenty of obvious questions about web 2.0 in India. From a venture capitalist’s point of view, web 2.0 is a waste of time. However, in the U.S., a man has capitalized the web 2.0 idea to another generously level; he gets 5,000 calls for YouTube posting. He goes on mention: “Some people’s own mothers won’t take the time to sit down and talk with them and have a conversation. But some stranger on YouTube will. After six seconds, you’re not a stranger anymore, you’re a new kid I just met.”