GLOBAL, MAY 2011 – How would you feel if your nine-year-old diary will be thrown away in a month’s time?
This same feeling swept over a million registered Friendster members when an email asking all users to export their profile data, as most of it will be unequivocally deleted on May 31, 2011.
Friendster, one of the first social networking sites that caught on in the Philippines, has finally decided to leave social networking behind to give way to a new Friendster which will be launched in a couple of weeks.
Malaysian payments company MOL Global purchased Friendster in December 2009, integrating a payment platform with the content network. The site underwent a redesign and emerged with new features that failed to regain its once dominant status as a social networking site.
The email sent by the Friendster Team to its users sparked speculations that the once famous site will be shutting down but Nikolai Galicia, Friendster and MOL country manager for the Philippines, denied such claims in his interview last week with abs-scbnnews.com but also admitted that they had lost against the social networking giant. "You can’t compete with Facebook. They did a good job. It’s a Facebook world," said Galicia.
With defeat by the social networking giant apparent, Friendster will focus on becoming a social entertainment site where users will be able to play games and listen to music. These changes require Friendster to delete some information from its database but its members will be able to keep their basic profile information and list of friends.
To facilitate the retrieval of uploads, the Friendster team developed an application which exports users’ profiles, photos and blogs. For instance, photos can be exported to Flickr or Multiply, and blogs to WordPress and Blogger.
Friendster now hopes that this transition from a social networking media to an entertainment site will make it more viable and popular with its young market, which has largely migrated to Facebook. Friendster management expects the new Friendster to complement Facebook.
