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By Ike Suarez, Correspondent
The Philippines is longer just the text capital of the world, but
also the capital for one of the most popular social networking sites
on the Internet.
“Today, there are 30 million Filipinos
registered with Friendster and 24.3 million of them are active
users, logging at least once every 30 days to our online social
network,” this was according to Friendster PR and Marketing
Director Jeff Roberto who spoke with The Manila Times during a break
in the sessions of the recently held Google DevFest at the UP
College of Social Work and Community Development at the Diliman,
Quezon City campus of the University of the Philippines.
Roberto flew to Manila along with other
advocates of the Open Social initiative to speak before participants
in the one-day developer conference held early November in UP.
Roberto told The Manila Times Friendster today
has 85 million people around the world registered with it and 60
million of them come from Asia, making it the number one online
social network in Asia and number three globally. “We are four
times bigger here in Asia than Multiply and 15 times larger
than MySpace” he claimed.
Roberto said that the other three countries in
Asia next to the Philippines in the number of registered users were
the following: Indonesia (11 million), Malaysia (6.1 million) and
Singapore (1.8 million).
He admitted that the number of Filipinos
registered with Friendster exceeded the 24 million Filipinos
estimated by various Net research companies to be connected to the
Internet through various means. He explained this was because many
Filipinos had multiple accounts with their online social network.
Roberto attributed Friendster’s popularity
with Filipinos to the fact that it launched in the San Francisco Bay
area in 2003 in California, a state with a large Fil-American
community who made up one of its early adopters. These Fil-Ams then
invited friends and relatives in the Philippines to join,
jumpstarting a viral membership recruitment campaign in the country.
Roberto said Friendster today generates revenues
from online advertising and corporate sponsorship of pages. He added
that their company would soon announce new revenue streams to be
added to their current marketing model, but did not elaborate.
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