Some consolidation afoot in the world on online payments coming at you, with a little blast from our social networking past. Rixty, a cash-based payment platform for games, virtual goods and other digital content, today received a majority-stake investment from MOL AccessPortal, the e-payment subsidiary of MOL Global, the company that bought social network Friendster in 2009 and then converted it… → Read More
Remember back in April when we reported that Friendster, one of the first dedicated social networking sites, was to unequivocally delete all user profiles photos, blogs, messages, groups and whatnot by May 31?
This morning, Friendster relaunched as yet another social gaming portal, powered by Facebook Connect (interesting comments over at Hacker News). → Read More
In 2005 Kyle MacDonald made a series of fourteen trades, beginning with a red paperclip and ending with a house. It took him less than a year. You all know the story. The Office did even an episode this year about the idea as well.
Well, Malaysia’s MOL Global now has somewhere around over $100 million in Facebook stock at the current secondary market valuation of around $31 per share. Until now… → Read More
Before MySpace and Facebook, there was Friendster, a pioneering social networking website for consumers. First launched in 2002, Friendster attracted tens of millions of users over the years, but it never quite grew into the online juggernaut it could have been.
Having raised close to $50 million in venture capital, Friendster was acquired by Malaysian payments company MOL Global at the end of… → Read More
More news from the social network Friendster. The site, which was acquired in December by Malaysian payments company MOL Global, has struck a deal with Yahoo Southeast Asia. The purpose of the deal is to integrate product features and cross-promote across both Friendster and Yahoo. Both Friendster and Yahoo stand to gain from the partnership as Friendster has a significant Asian audience and Yahoo… → Read More
We’ve got more details on the Friendster acquisition announced last week. Rumors were floating that the buyer, MOL Global, paid as much as $100 million for Friendster. The real price, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources, was under $30 million. Just a few months ago, based on comparable valuations from Bebo, LinkedIn and Facebook (and taking into account Friendster’s largely Asian audience)… → Read More
Log on to Friendster today and you’ll see a background image that says ‘Watch this face! … on December 4′. Turns out the pioneering social network is in for a major revamp tomorrow, including a new logo, tagline (“Connecting Smiles”) and an entirely fresh look.
Friendster outlines some of the changes in a video (embedded below), in which it calls out other social networks (*cough* Facebook and … → Read More
I knew the glory days of Friendster were behind them, but I didn’t know things were this bad. The company is proudly announcing a partnership with Washington based people search company Intelius this evening. The goal, they say, is “to provide a more robust and comprehensive user search experience on Friendster and to power people searches originating on Friendster with results from across the… → Read More
Friendster, one of the oldest social networks, is actively looking for a buyer and has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to find a party interested in acquiring the company or at least some of its assets.
According to documents obtained exclusively by TechCrunch, it looks like Morgan Stanley is shopping Friendster around in Asia, which makes sense considering almost its entire user base is… → Read More
Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.
Using Alexa and Google Trend… → Read More
A year ago we modeled out the true value of various social networks based on the idea that users in high-value online advertising markets like Japan, the UK and the U.S. were worth more (financially speaking) than those in lower value online advertising markets. Facebook had recently become the largest worldwide social network in terms of users, but based on our model MySpace was still by far the… → Read More
Social network Friendster has over 30 million monthly visitors worldwide, says Comscore. The problem (or perhaps the opportunity) is that just 1.7 million of those visitors are in the U.S. The vast majority, nearly 28 million, are in the Asia/Pacific region.
The company’s new CEO, Richard Kimber, is based in Sydney Australia. Friendster’s old San Francisco headquarters have been relocated as… → Read More
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). … → Read More
Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps. First there was MySpace and Orkut, then Hi5, and most recently Friendster. All told, if you add up the various social networks that are now live with… → Read More
These social networks sure do like Google execs. Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s VP Global Online Sales And Operations, in March 2008. Bebo hired away Joanna Shields as President – previously she was Google’s Managing Director for Google Europe, Russia, Middle East & Africa. Now Friendster. They’ve hired Richard Kimber, who was Google’s Managing Director… → Read More
Is MySpace worth $3 billion, or $20 billion? It depends on how you value a user. It’s time to start comparing the big global social networks on something other than unique visitors and page views. I believe an effective way to value a particular user is based on the average Internet advertising spend per person in the country they live in. The higher the spend, the more value the social… → Read More
In April, Facebook caught up to MySpace in worldwide unique visitors (actually nudging past it with 116.4 million unique visitors versus 115.7 million for MySpace). Now the worldwide comScore numbers are out for May and Facebook continues to blow past MySpace with 123.9 million uniques (up 6 percent), versus 114.6 million for MySpace (down 1 percent). Facebook also boasted more pageviews worldwide… → Read More
If you try to buy an ad on Facebook, there are certain words that are taboo. Any ads that contain four-letter words are automatically blocked. So too are ads with the names of competing social networks “MySpace,” “Friendster,” “Hi5,” , or “Orkut.” (Curiously, “Bebo” and “OpenSocial” go through just fine, as does… → Read More
In the global race to be the top social network, MySpace and Facebook are neck and neck. In January, 2008, MySpace was still the biggest social network worldwide with 109 million unique visitors, according to comScore. But Facebook was close on its heels with 101 million. (Meanwhile, the data in the U.S. for Facebook at least shows a possible slowdown in growth). While MySpace and Facebook are… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
