Multiply has been growing rather quietly internationally. The social media aggregator now has 7 million registered users and 10.5 million monthly unique visitors according to their internal numbers, nearly triple their 2006 traffic. Comscore’s most recent numbers show 12.5 million uniques for September. The service acts like a meta social network where users can collect and share content from multiple social sites (photos, video, blogs). See our earlier comparison with Vox. Users post 1.25 million photos, 16,000 videos and 55,000 blog entries daily. However, while the U.S. is home to the largest share of their registered users, most of their traffic is international. The Philippines is one of the most pronounced examples of their large international following. Alexa ranks Multiply as the 5th largest site in the Philippines – with more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. We had earlier reported that 39% of the site’s traffic comes from the Philippines. Therefore it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to land a multi-year ad deal with one of the Philippine’s largest networks, ABS-CBN. ABS-CBN has 67 televisions stations, 19 radio stations, 30 websites and reaches 97% of the Filipinos with televisions. Under terms of the agreement, ABS-CBN interactive will sell advertising and mobile services for Multiply’s Filipino users, with the two companies sharing revenues. The deal highlights the importance of international markets U.S. press often take for granted. Sites like Friendster and Orkut have found large international followings while their U.S. markets are dormant. With a global internet, foreign markets are expected to become even more important in the future. According to research firm Datamonitor Plc., by the end of this year, Asia will account for 35% of the world’s social networking users, with 28% of users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 25% in North America, and 12% in the Caribbean and Latin America. Once again, startups concerned about getting big may want to get international. CrunchBase Information Multiply Friendster Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners. No word on whether MySpace will continue with efforts to complete its own recently announced platform, but the answer is probably yes. They are likely to simply do both (Update: see below). Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game. Update (12:30 PST): On a press call with Google now. This was embargoed for 5:30 pm PST but they’ve moved the time up to 12:30 PST (now). Press release will go out later this evening. My notes: On the call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “we’ve been working with MySpace for more than a year in secret on this” (likely corresponding to their advertising deal announced a year ago). MySpace says their new platform efforts will be entirely focused on OpenSocial. The press release names Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as current OpenSocial partners. We’re seeing a Flixster application on MySpace now through the OpenSocial APIs. Flixster says it took them less than a day to create this. I’ll add screen shots below. Here’s the big question – Will Facebook now be forced to join OpenSocial? Google says they are talking to “everyone.” This is a major strategic decision for Facebook, and they may have little choice but to join this coalition. Bebo has also joined OpenSocial. Flixster/MySpace screen shots: CrunchBase Information MySpace Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Good thing we launched the CrunchBase widget, because you may need it to refresh your memory about a certain social networking company called Friendster that’s announcing its own developer platform today (okay okay, to be fair, they do have 50 million users and are very popular in Asia). Friendster’s platform announcement comes five months after that of Facebook and not even a week after that of MySpace, the company that usurped Friendster a few years ago. Looks like Facebook will need to find itself another major differentiator, because developer platforms are becoming commodities just like social networks themselves. Admittedly, it may be too early to make this prediction. We haven’t even seen either MySpace or Friendster’s offerings after all. One company may end up continually executing their platform much better than the rest. However, judging by Friendster’s description of their platform – which will be open to developers immediately but not live for users until November 30th – these platforms will probably end up looking very much alike. Friendster will allow developers to advertise with their widgets but will not require any revenue sharing; there will be a “widget directory” much like Facebook’s application directory; widgets in Friendster will be promoted virally using a “My Network Module” akin to Facebook’s news feed; Friendster widgets will be able to access “Friendster data” (which must mean profile, or “social graph”, data); and Friendster vows to improve the platform over time in response to community feedback. In what could amount to little more than fluff, but could also mean something more substantial, Friendster is claiming that its platform will be non-proprietary. The suggestion is that widgets developed for other platforms will be easily deployable on Friendster’s platform. Another possible differentiator: it looks as though widget creators will be allowed to display advertisements anywhere they please within their creations, and not just on canvas-like pages as in Facebook. Friendster is calling this announcement the “third stage” of its opening up process. Apparently in August 2006 the company started letting users add HTML and Flash widgets to their profiles and in September 2007 they created “Fan Profiles” for music promoters. Thus, we arrive at the third stage. Yea, sounds like a stretch to me, too. If you are a developer who wants to start working now in preparation for November 30th when widgets will be available to Friendster users, you can check out this online → Read More
Friendster is back, at least in Asia. The social network that was the coolest thing on the block until MySpace came around has been slowly regaining its reputation and users over the years, and now boasts 50 million registered user and 27.4 million monthly unique visitors. The only problem (if you call it a problem) is that, like Orkut, most of those users are outside of the U.S. Specifically, they’re in the Asia/Pacific region – 24 million of the total 27.4 million unique monthly visitors come from there, as do 35 million of the 50 million registered users. So it’s no surprise that the social network is playing to its strengths and launching its first non-English version, in traditional Chinese. This isn’t a separate website or URL; users simply click to Chinese to have the content localized to that language. User generated stuff remains in the original language. → Read More
Friendster experienced a 40% page view growth rate in May, according to the latest comScore traffic figures published at Venturebeat. Friendster currently sits in 4th place on the list of popular social networking sites, behind MySpace, Facebook and Hi5, but ahead of Tagged.com, Bebo and Piczo. In an age where everyone presumes that Facebook reigns supreme, the question becomes: how is it possible for Friendster to grow at 40%? Prevailing theory relating to the growth of social networking sites suggests that social network popularity is a one or the other proposition in a finite marketplace. In others words users will abandon MySpace or Friendster when they begin using Facebook, and that the number of overall users isn’t growing. The growth rates from both MySpace and Friendster at the same time as Facebook is booming would suggest that the theory is wrong. First, the one or the other proposition. As I noted on MySpace June 20, users have invested time and effort on existing sites and many will not want to give this up, particularly when the feature set of the alternative service (in this case Facebook) is not the same (personalization). Conversely users do want to link to friends where ever they are, creating a demand for multiple social networking memberships. In the same way that many may use Flickr for photos on Yahoo and Google for everything else, social network users may simply maintain different friend sets on each service, and will maintain participation on both. One is not used instead of the other. Secondly, the overall market is growing. As noted in the Venturebeat article Friendster is experiencing rapid growth in Malaysia and the Philippines. There is a market place outside of the United States; only 4.53% of the world’s population lives in the United States (wikipedia), China will have more broadband users than the United States in the next 12-18 months and India has the largest number of English speaking people of any country worldwide. Smart startups build products that appeal to a global audience, an audience which provides a wealth of growth opportunities at much higher rates than in a mature marketplace such as the United States. Friendster growing is good for the entire Web 2.0 industry. There can be no downturn without a broad decline in user numbers across many sites. Friendster proves that despite strong, and some would argue superior competition, there’s still room → Read More
The big social networks continue to side with Advertising networks to help monetize their sites. MySpace signed a $900 million deal with Google in August 2006, and Facebook countered by choosing Microsoft a couple of weeks later. This morning, Friendster announced a mult-year exclusive deal to work with Google on both search and keyword-targeted advertising. The financial terms are not being disclosed. Friendster is not in the same league as MySpace and Facebook, but this is still a win for Google. Friendster generates 6 billion or so page views per month, about 1/6 of MySpace. → Read More
In an investors meeting in Australia yesterday, Rupert Murdoch said that MySpace could now be sold for $6 billion — about a 10x return on the original $580 million that News Corp. paid for it. In other news, one of the many MySpace alternatives, Facebook, is rumored to be in talks with IAC — or at least Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) and Jason Rapp (IAC SVP of M&A) were seen mingling together at the Foursquare conference in NY. Facebook has been in acquisition talks with Yahoo in the past, but either the price was too much or acquisition activity halted due to poor stock performance. A social network is something that the extensive IAC portfolio lacks, but I’m not sure Facebook with their primarily college demographic and steep price tag (rumored $2 billion) are the best fit. If I were IAC, I’d be looking at the well-branded (yet stagnant) Friendster — IAC’s network would breathe new life into Friendster, and the past rumored $50 – $100 million price tag pales in comparison to Facebooks’. Friendster has been up-for-sale in the past and holds actual patents on social networking, which likely will result in News Corp. paying licensing fees for in the future (once Friendster has rallied their legal case together, and once MySpace’s wallet, er, growth, plateaus — allowing Friendster to tap into a business worth much more than the $6 billion Rupert speaks of today). → Read More
Gary Rivlin at the New York Times finally wrote the Friendster “tell all” piece that everyone’s been threatening to do for some time (me included). It’s not pretty. I get the sense the most people mentioned in the article are not going to be very happy with the way it turned out. Many of them have actively been trying to stop an article like this from being written. Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003. Everything went downhill from there. Instead of selling to Google, founder Jonathan Abrams raised venture capital. Friendster eventually raised money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, BenchMark Capital and Battery Ventures. Some of the most successful and well known venture capitalists in silicon valley joined Friendster’s board of directors. Friendster stumbled just as MySpace rose. Many people point to Friendster’s massive slow down as traffic grew as the reason people bailed out for the then hot new MySpace. If Friendster had been able to handle its growth, MySpace may never have gotten the space it needed to become the 1 billion plus page views per day behemoth it is today. Key points of failure seem to be a disastrous initial architecture that just couldn’t scale, a succession of high profile but out of touch CEOs (Tim Koogle, then Scott Sassa, then Taek Kwan), infighting at the executive level (particularly between the VP Product and VP Engineering) and a general level of arrogance at the board and executive level. No one is spared in the article, including Kleiner Perkins Partner John Doerr and former partner Russ Siegelman After a failure to sell the company in late 2005, they recapitalized early this year and Kent Lindstrom, one of the founders of Friendster, took over as President. He’s not one to talk about his own accomplishments, but Friendster seems to be trending upwards now at least. He brings the company what it needs – a steady and low key leader who focuses on the product. → Read More
San Francisco based Piczo is having a media coming-out party today, with announcements on the current state of the service and key statistics. A few weeks ago CEO Jeremy Verba did the same thing in the UK – which we covered on TechCrunch UK. Piczo is adding 35,000 new member registrations per day, 75% of which are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old. Ten million unique visitors come to Piczo sites monthly, adding up to 2.5 billion page views. While this isn’t much compared to monster competitor MySpace (which serves over 1 billion pages per day), it shows what the power of the network effect can do when applied properly – Piczo hasn’t spent a dime on marketing. And unlike Myspace, Piczo is focused on safety first. It is virtually impossible to browse user pages on Piczo. There is no search or browse feature. Users must share their page URL with others for it to be found, and there are numerous ways for users, parents and others to report inappropriate behavior. Piczo has full time staff reviewing all complaints and takes swift action to protect its members. Piczo was founded in early 2004 as a paid service. Based on early user feedback it was relaunched as a free service, and founder Jim Conning sent out 100 emails to Canadian teenagers announcing the new site. That is where Piczo’s marketing efforts began and, until now, ended. The result of those 100 emails has been a massive viral spread of the product. Piczo brought in a high powered CEO late last year, Jeremy Verba. Verba was previously GM and Vice President of AOL’s Voice Services division, which he grew to over a million subscribers. In addition, he was co-founder and president of E!Online, a joint venture of CNET and E!Entertainment Television, now a part of Comcast. Piczo is well funded after pocketing a total of US$7 million over two rounds of financing from Sierra Ventures and Catamount in 2005 and 2006. The Social Networking Space I thought this was a good opportunity to look up Comscore numbers on the largest social networking players and see how things are evolving (these are U.S. numbers only). MySpace is still the king, with over a billion page views per day, 100 million registered users and 56 million unique visitors per month. If anything, their lead is growing over competitors. But that doesn’t mean there → Read More
Sagging social network Friendster was awarded a patent on some pretty fundamental qualities of online social networking late last month. The patent covers the determining and display of relationships between individuals who have entered personal information into a social network; specifically, determining who is in your circle of friends and who isn’t. The patent application was filed just over three years ago – what a great example of the dangers of a behind-the-times US Patent and Trademark Office. New technologies in many fields pose a real problem when the USPTO tries to find examiners and infrastructure capable of knowing what existing practices are, evaluating non-obviousness, etc. Friendster has a number of prominent investors and Kleiner Perkins put in additional funds this February. CNN’s The Browser blog writes today that “Suing rivals for patent infringement is no way to make friends — but it is a way to make money.” When asked whether licenses or lawsuits were likely, Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com, “it’s way too early to say…We’ll do what we can to protect our intellectual property.” If this patent survives and is considered relevant to what’s now a huge sector of the online world, I expect that the chorus of voices demanding patent reform will grow much louder. It’s hard to imagine, though, what would have happened if this patent had been granted in a timely fashion. Advocates of a strong patent system often argue that unless innovations are given patent protection, no one will invest in innovating. Clearly that argument doesn’t hold up in this case. → Read More
Since ceding social network dominance to Myspace in 2004, Friendster has gone through massive reorganizations, countless consultants and three CEOs. Even a Kleiner partner fell due in part to his mismanagement of the company at the board level. However, under the current leadership of Kent Lindstrom, one of the founders (and CFO until taking over early this year), Friendster is making a comeback of sorts. It turns out the key to making the social network work was pretty simple: creating a scalable architecture that served pages fast, and allowing users a degree of freedom in creating their pages (instead of a rigid hierarchy that leaves all pages looking more or less the same). The result? A steady and impressive growth in page views since Kent took over. So it isn’t unexpected that Friendster would copy yet more features of long time rival Myspace. And instant messaging is next. Myspace launched an IM client (Windows only) earlier this month, to generally positive reviews. Friendster’s version, which is in development, will be web chat, not a downloadable client (“Meebo” style). I am getting conflicting reports on this: one source says that the service will be created in partnership with Los Angeles based Userplane. Another says its being built offshore by the company itself. Either way, I have early, rough screen shots of the product, below, and not much more information. → Read More
Embattled social networking site Friendster, with an impressive group of investors that includes Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, BenchMark Capital and Battery Ventures, has not been able to keep up with competitors. Even so, not many companies can claim to have John Doerr, Bob Kagle, Jeffrey Katz, Tim Koogle and Roger Lee on their board. It is a poorly kept secret that Friendster has been searching for an aquiror for some time, although obviously no one has yet stepped up the the altar. The rumor floating around over the last week, which I’ve heard from multiple sources close to Kleiner Perkins, is that the fund has stepped in to stop a shutdown. They have injected limited additional funds (I’ve heard numbers between $5 million and $12 million) and have restructured the capitalization of the company to heavily favor their fund (this would be customary in a recapitalization). No reports as to whether BenchMark or Battery were also involved, or whether the current executive team will be looking for new jobs. Update: More rumors, that the round was done at a $3m pre-money valuation. This is not a healthy company. → Read More
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