The most popular social networking platform in South-East Asian countries, Friendster has added a new launguage, i.e. Indonesian. With now the availability in Indonesian, Japanese and Korean languages that they added in last December, Friendster is now fully supports seven languages - English, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. But there’s still much room left for Friendster to carry out their languages covering project, particularly in viewed of Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysia), and Thai (Thailand) still not existed on their home page.

To date, Friendster still the number one online social network in Asia-Pacific. In an article released by comScore, users from Asia-Pacific spent approximately 90 million hours on Friendster barely in August last year, as shown in the picture below. Meanwhile, they also released another report recently, stated that Friendster in Indonesia has over 8 million registered users and 4 million monthly unique visitors as of February this year.

Source: available at http://www.comscore.com/blog/2007/10/consumer_trends_in_social_netw.html, accessed 10 April 2008

Now Friendster directory has a new widget that allowed Friendster users to access their profiles on mobile phones. This mobile widget is known as FriendsterToGo, a newly launched widget that dubbed as Friendster “Go Mobile” application, and it is the first mobile application that designed exclusively using the Friendster Developer program.

This widget is created with the purpose of bringing the Friendster users, amounted to 56 million a totally different social experience. By adding this widget to their profiles, Friendster users can conduct their Friendster activities on their mobile phones, such as update their status, see the latest status of their friends, share photos, view other users’ profiles, and many more. However, the only requirement for them is the login to this FriendsterToGo mobile site with their Friendster email addresses and passwords.

FriendsterToGo was created by guideCast, a mobile brand agency that based in Toronto, Canada.

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. Most of my male friends that owned Friendster accounts are those who want to look for friends online from there, or spend time in browsing other girls’ profile pages. Unfortunately, I am not this type of people, and I can’t imagine myself login to my Friendster’s profile once in every day and do these, and basically these are the reasons that stopping me from opening a Friendster account.

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.

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.