When was friendster launched

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Di Asia, pada , Friendster memiliki pengunjung unik bulanan lebih banyak daripada jejaring sosial lain. Later the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies.

Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks. After the launching of Friendster as a social gaming platform in June , the number of registered users reached over million. As of , Friendster had more monthly unique visitors than any other social network in Asia.

Friendster remained notably popular in Indonesia through In May , less than a year after his appointment, Sassa was already being released from his duties.

Furthermore, Friendster laid off 5 out of its 55 employees. Kwon was able to at least partially stop the bleeding. Under his leadership, Friendster completely redesigned its website, copying many of the features that made Myspace so popular such as the ability to publish blog posts. Despite the successful overhaul, Kwon only lasted in his position for about six months.

In December , he and many of his colleagues decided to depart from Friendster. The company even had troubles meeting payroll. As a result, rumors about a potential sale began to emerge. After all, Friendster still had a valuable brand with millions of registered users. Kwon was ultimately replaced by Kent Lindstrom who initially joined Myspace as Chief Financial Officer right after it was founded.

With Lindstrom at the helm of Friendster, it began doubling down on the building blocks that worked. The company launched different language versions of its website and even opened local offices in countries like the Philippines. Next, Friendster successfully filed for a variety of patents that it had previously applied for. Over the course of the next two years, Friendster had registered five patents that were covering general social media usage. Investors also began to regain trust in the company.

Additional features such as a classmate function to connect with people from high school or college or fan pages to follow artists and other celebrities added further appeal to the site. In December , Friendster even launched its very own developer platform, allowing others to create and advertise apps on its platform. The move mimicked previously launched platforms by Facebook as well as Myspace.

At that time, Friendster had close to 75 million users , up from 45 million just a year prior. Meanwhile, its San Francisco office had only a handful of people left. Over the course of , Friendster began shopping itself around Asia, making it clear that it was up for grabs. Those advances finally came to fruition in December Throughout , it became evident why MOL decided to acquire Friendster.

Meanwhile, MOL had some different plans for Friendster. The same month it sold its patents to Facebook, Friendster added a social games portal, dubbed Friendster Games , offering free MMO massively multiplayer online games. The site continued to be live up until June when it was eventually shut down. MOL stated a challenging business environment as well as a lack of user engagement as the reasons for its ultimate closure. The single biggest reason why Friendster failed was that its website was often overwhelmed with the massive traffic it had.

In what was once a graveyard of failed attempts at building social networks even Google was brought to its knees , Friendster appeared to emerge as the winner, boasting over 3 million users in less than a year.

Many thought Friendster had won the race. Friendster was founded by Jonathan Abrams, a Canadian computer programmer, in March The site started in a basement with ten friends and went live that same month. It grew to several hundred users within a few weeks and grew to over 3 million users by early Anyways, Friendster continued to gain momentum in Its user base was growing faster than it could handle.

And, just like any other founder of a fast-growing early stage tech company, Abrams took Friendster to the Silicon beauty pageant. Little did Abrams know that this single decision would play a pivotal role in his fortune and that of his company.

Friendster generated strong interest from Google and several VC firms. Friendster, true to its vision, began to expand internationally and gained strong momentum in Asia, especially in South East Asia. However, the picture at home was not as rosy. Friendster peaked at about 10 million users and began to tumble downhill.

Customers faced with incessant bugs and brick walls in logging into their page soon eloped with the newcomer, Facebook.