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Friendster Inc., an online social networking site, is
now available on mobile phones.
In an interview with David Jones,
vice-president for global marketing at Friendster, the 70 million
users of Friendster around the globe can now access the site using
their own Internet-ready mobile devices. They can access the site
using the URL, m.friendster.com, the first in the series of
Friendster Mobile offerings.
“It is designed to help
existing Friendster users to stay connected with their friends while
on the go. Friendster users can actually do most of the things they
can do in website,” Jones said.
The mobile site allows Friendster
users to check their network activity, view and update profiles,
browse photos, send and receive requests and messages, read
testimonials, post shoutouts, get their horoscopes and more. The new
service is free for all users, however, users are subject to
specific carrier data plan or wireless Internet service provider
plan.
The service will also be
available in multiple languages, with Indonesian as the first
additional language. Jones added that the service is currently
available only to existing Friendster users, but can later be
accessed by non-users who want to create their own Friendster
accounts directly on their mobile phones.
Jones also shared that the site
is opening up with a developer program to serve its user community
and developers. “By having developer program, these people can
sign up for free, register, do a little work to integrate with
Friendster and get to introduce their feature to our users.”
The program allows developers to
access Friendster Application Programming Interfaces and utilize
content and data within the network to build and deploy customizable
applications, according to Friendster.
Launched in December 2007, the
popular web portal already has 10 million unique users running the
application. “With this program, you can put ads anywhere in your
application to make money as a developer. And this is the only way
to reach 50 million people in Asia,” he added.
Asia’s No.1 social
networking site
Since its launch in 2003,
Friendster has now over 68 million registered users and 39 million
monthly unique visitors globally. According to Jones, Friendster is
currently ranked the third largest social networking sites in the
world based on traffic.
In Asia, despite the rapid rise
of Facebook and MySpace, Friendster remains the No.1 social
networking site.
It has over 50 million registered
users and 34 million unique visitors a month from Asia compared to
Facebook’s 16 million and Myspace.com and MySpace.cn’s 16
million combined, added Jones, referring the figures taken from
comScore Media Metrix, a division of comScore Networks that measures
Web site audiences in the United States.
“Friendster is easy to use, not
complicated to navigate, interactive and fun. Those things are how
we differentiating ourselves from other companies.” Jones said.
Locally, Friendster is popular
among Filipinos with 14 million online users on the list. With that,
it has put up an office here in the Philippines early 2007 as part
of its expansion.
--Cris-Ann G. Odronia
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