The other day I came across this Pictogame, a site that allowed an user 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.

I just came across a newly launched social networking search engine that called yoName. The launched of yoName will definitely help reinvigorate the users in various social networks that always wondered how they could find their friends amongst all different user-driven content web applications and social networking providers. However, currently this search engine would capable in deliver people search from MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, Facebook, Digg and Match. It aimed to provides a one-stop social networking search engine by leveraging the existing assets, i.e. people in the aforesaid providers. No doubt yoName is targeting the rising trend and popularity of social networking, but an apparent problem is how the users group of these providers would want to use, in other word mocking around friends through the offered services of yoName. Moreover, it appeared that yoName is not working 100% at least when I enter my friends’ information for some of the above mentioned sites. It seems that they’re not updating their database from the providers in a timely manner. One day they didn’t fix this problem, the users will not use it or the current users will flee.

yoName is not the only social search engine in the market. Wink does provides people search on MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Live Spaces, and Friendster. So do ProfileLinker, Upscoop, and the stealth Streakr.

Is Friendster a social network no one talk about anymore? It seems true in the U.S.; In the comScore Media Metrix press release, Friendster not even listed in the Top 10 most visitors social network site, but it was not in Asia. It gained huge popularity in Asia South.

According to the New York Times (registration required), three quarters of Friendster’s users live outside the United States, mainly in the Philippines, Malaysia and other, smaller southeast Asian countries. Another source also stated that Friendster ranked at the top position for social networking websites in Singapore, with 56.3% market share for the week ending July 15, 2006.

Why Friendster mean so special to the Asian? I believed the main reason is due to the peer pressure. One would probably would not join a new social networking site if he/she never even heard of it. If your friends was there, you were allured to it definitely. It really didn’t take much persuading in the process. This works for Asian especially Asian view trust as an important element in building a long-lasting friendship. Take a look at the picture above, you will see there are similar characteristics amongst groups of people available in Friendster. You probably can call it cultural or localization factors. The same holds true for a guy if he wanted to look for good-looking girls, he probably tried to locate her somewhere in his comfort-zone, i.e. near his home address. Moreover, my opinion is Asians seem to be quite loyal to the things or sites they get used to, thus Friendster gained dominant in Asia South easily. For this reason, I know it’s a bit harsh to say Friendster is an Asian social networking site. But sooner or later, it would going to happen in that way.

The way I see it, it’s a huge opportunity for Friendster to further establish itself in Asia. If Friendster could capitalize its first-mover advantage in Asia South, Friendster still get the chance to become a multibillion-dollar company.