Friendster: Әлеуметтік желі мен ойын платформасының тарихы

Social gaming site

Friendster was a social network based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Later, the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages, and comments with other members via profiles and networks. After the launching of Friendster as a social gaming platform in June 2011, the number of registered users reached over 115 million. The company operated mainly from four Asian countries: the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, and over 90% of the site's traffic came from Asia. As of 2008, Friendster had more monthly unique visitors than any other social network in Asia. Friendster remained notably popular in Indonesia through 2012. The company suspended services in 2015, citing "the evolving landscape in our challenging industry" and lack of engagement by the online community, and ceased trading in 2018.

The company was founded in 2002 with a $12 million investment by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, and private investors. In 2003, Friendster management received a $30 million buyout offer from Google, which it declined. In August 2006, Friendster also received $10 million in funding in a round led by DAG Ventures, Prior to its acquisition by MOL Global, Friendster was backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, IDG Ventures, and individual investors.

In July 2006, Friendster was awarded Key Social Networking Technology Patent. In 2007, Friendster was selected by AlwaysOn Media as Top 100 Private Company Award Winner. In April 2008, Friendster became a Webware 100 winner. In 2009, the site was the subject of a satirical portrayal by The Onion News Network of the site's discovery as an archaeological relic, untouched since 2005.

In November 2009, Friendster announced a global partnership with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL), a leading payments provider leveraging a network of over 600,000 physical and virtual payment channels worldwide, to power the Friendster Wallet and a payments platform enabling micro spending for over 115 million registered users on Friendster. The Friendster Wallet was designed to support a variety of payment methods including pre paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments. Friendster also had content partners, including game developers and publishers who provided monetization solutions on the Friendster platform using MOL's payment channels and Friendster's large user base. Sub brands of Friendster included "Friendster iCafe", a cybercafe management system, and "Friendster Hotspots", a free Wi Fi infrastructure for retailers.

Available languages include English, Filipino, Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

Friendster has been an open site since August 2006 when it first began allowing widgets and content to be embedded in user profile pages through its developer program. In 2007, roughly 40% of Friendster's users had widgets on their profiles. Friendster was the first social network to support both the OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform.

In June 2011, Friendster shifted from social networking site to a social entertainment site with a focus on gaming and entertainment. Previous users' accounts are unchanged. However, all the photos, messages, comments, testimonials, shoutouts, blogs, forums and groups that the users may have had in the past may no longer be part of their Friendster account. An exporting tool is provided to back up the information of the user account. This tool has the ability to export photos to Flickr and Multiply. The deadline given to users to export their photos was extended to June 27, 2011. Photos which were not exported before the deadline were removed and are no longer retrievable. In the two months after the new Friendster relaunched, the site attracted more than half a million new users and included over 40 games. Daily and monthly active users increased by 50%, with more than 90% of new users coming from Asia. At the end of 2015 Friendster closed the website and related services, and on July 1, 2018, it officially ceased to exist as a company.