Could Friendster Make a Comeback?

Posted on August 23, 2006

A BusinessWeek article considers a possible Friendster comeback bid. With an influx of new capital and a social networking patent win Friendster is ready to give it a good shot. Growth has remained flat in the U.S. but Businessweek says Friendster is hot in Asia.

Since then, Lindstrom has set out to reverse Friendster's course. He's taken steps to improve the site and respond to user feedback. The latest funding round will feed that effort. "We've been growing rapidly over the past few months, and we want to make sure we have the capital to keep the site reliable," he says.
In the U.S., the number of unique visitors has vacillated between 1 million and 1.5 million all year. But overall, the site had 15.6 million unique monthly visitors in July, largely due to the growing number of users in Asia. Lindstrom says the increase represents a growth in friendsters in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Australia.
What else is on tap? The company now plans to focus on post-college users, young urban adults looking to connect to people in new cities. The recently redesigned site focuses attention on what users are doing, rather than inviting folks to surf profiles. Friendster will put resources into hiring engineers to make the site more user-friendly. Cool or not cool, Lindstrom believes that former users will come back and new ones will join if it is useful to them.

The post-college market might be a smart move for Friendster. These people are more mobile than college and high school students and may check out new social networks when they change jobs and move to new cities. The Friendster site now has a simpler, seeker look where photos and videos are featured more prominently. With strong growth in Asia it is unfair to call Friendster a failure anymore. Currently, Friendster has 30 million members which puts it about 70 million behind social network leader MySpace.com. MySpace hit the 100 million account number on August 9th according to Mashable.