It could have demolished thousands of no-bearing and successful social media sites today. It could have grown into a multi-billion dollar account. It could have changed Facebook’s pathway to lifestyle existence. It could have prolonged its domination. It could have erased the movie “The Social Network” on The Oscar’s Nomination List. It could have been the most popular thing in this world–and we all know why we are stressing on the phrase “it could have been”.
Friendster’s popularity was a juggernaut fad then. It also gave birth to thousands of online satirical sites like Fiendster and Friemster- two deliberately misspelled domains directing innocent kids to flamboyant and gaudy voyeur sites.
Lampoon is flattery, and Friendster once had lots of it.
Before Facebook, Myspace, and even Twitter, there was Friendster. Friendster began its flourishing career in 2002, and ended it up on an unremarkable unrecorded date. Unrecorded, for Friendster has never been really out of the market–people and time just kicked them out of the picture.
People got bored with repetitive dating features, cheap inclusions, and dirty additions on the site, not to mention the virus and spams–until Friendster became a real life satire of “then catching up” Myspace and rising Facebook.
Friendster almost calls it done
A group of online mockers in Asia once called Friendster as PIMSter because of its uncontrollably popularity to only four South East Asian countries like Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
Friendster undoubtedly managed to survive with the help of these four countries. However, while they are experiencing social media glory in these four Asian countries, the Western market has already betrayed them over newcomer Facebook. Therefore, they continued focusing on the “PIMS” market and turned their site into an Asianesque copycat of Facebook. With the inclusion of chat, tagging, and improved “short messaging updating system”, which they later coined as “shout out”, they successfully won the lower class markets of the mentioned countries, yet it was still not enough to dominate again the international social media market.
Yet again, Friendster wanted change. They now want to focus on “fun and entertainment”, a feel very similar to equally less popular Myspace. They want all blogs, updates, testimonials, and photos to be deleted to repackage their site with ease, without the hassles of irate users having their precious accounts deleted without further notice. Now, the company is asking all users to install a custom application to export all their profile data, as most of it will be clearly deleted on May 31, 2011. Pretty sweet for a loving social media provider.
I even saw a Filipino teenager on Internet TV vehemently crying because of the fast-approaching farewell event.
Therefore, the fight is still on for Friendster. Perhaps they can outwit Myspace’s creative team and dream for that nth spot. And with the emotions offered by loyal users I’ve been seeing on the Web, I personally believe that Friendster still has a long way to go.