Friendster, Inc. News

Friendster Now Available in Malay

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, June 18 PRNewswire — Friendster, Inc. (http://www.friendster.com) today announced that Friendster.com is available in Malay, allowing Friendster users and visitors a greater choice of languages with which to navigate the site, enter content and use Friendster's complete set of social networking features. The 15 million Internet users in Malaysia and Malaysians around the world can now easily join and use Friendster, the pioneer of social networking that is now the 7th largest website globally of any kind based on traffic and the #1 social network in Asia.(1)

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080618/AQW057)

Friendster now fully supports nine languages — English, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. These languages represent over 70 percent of the world's Internet users, or almost a billion Internet users in total.

In Malaysia, Friendster has over 4 million monthly unique visitors to Friendster.com as of April 2008. Since there are over 15 million Internet users in Malaysia,(2) over 27 percent of Malaysia visited Friendster in April. A typical user spends 30 minutes a day on Friendster and visits Friendster several times a week, communicating with friends and sharing/consuming content through a suite of features.

Friendster is the most popular online social network in Malaysia according to a recent analysis of industry data.(3) "With over 4 million active users every week, Friendster is at least four times larger than Facebook or MySpace in Malaysia," said David Jones, vice president of global marketing at Friendster. "As the second largest Web site in Malaysia (second only to Yahoo!) and the #1 social network in Malaysia, launching support for Malay will help Friendster maintain and extend its leadership position in the country as well as with Malaysians around the world."

Malay as a language choice on Friendster has been available in beta since May 22, 2008. In only a few weeks, 100,000 users per day are now using Friendster in Malay, and they are currently viewing pages on Friendster in Malay at the rate of over 40 million pages per month. "We are pleased with the level of adoption during this initial, brief beta phase," said Jones. "Friendster has a large number of bilingual users who would like the choice to enter their content and use the site in either English or Malay, and countless users are looking forward to inviting their friends and family who speak Malay to join them on Friendster."

Friendster has implemented multi-language support on a single domain — Friendster.com — to promote communication and interaction among users who speak different languages. Seventy-nine percent of active Friendster users have friends in more than one country, and 23 percent of friend connections are between users in different countries. These cross-border percentages, believed to be the highest of all major social networks, require multi-language support to be implemented in a single global Web site. While other social networking sites create separate sites for different countries or languages, Friendster was the first global online social network to employ this single-site approach to allow and encourage multi-cultural exchange and communications — regardless of language — among users around the world and especially in Asia. Additionally, Friendster users can enter content in any language throughout the site as they use Friendster's complete set of social networking features.

Users can permanently or temporarily set their language of choice via links at the top right of every page of the Friendster.com Web site or via the "Settings" link.

Friendster Leads in Asia

Friendster is the #1 social network in Asia, with over 52 million registered users and 36 million monthly unique visitors from Asia.(1) In Asia, Friendster is more than twice the size of any other social network. While Friendster has 36 million monthly unique visitors in Asia, Facebook has 18 million, MySpace.com and MySpace.cn have 16 million combined, Mixi (Japan) has 14 million, CyWorld (Korea) has 13 million, Hi5 has 12 million, Orkut has 12 million, Xiaonei (China) has 7 million, 51.com (China) has 6 million, and Bebo has 4 million.(1)

Friendster, A Top 10 Website Globally

Friendster is the 7th largest website in the world of any kind and the 3rd largest social network in terms of traffic, with over 22.4 billion page views a month.(1) Friendster is 1st in "user engagement" among the top 5 global social networks, with visitors to Friendster.com averaging 229 minutes per month. And user engagement on Friendster is more than double those of other top global non-social networking websites, such as YouTube (93 minutes), eBay (78 minutes), Google (48 minutes) and Amazon (14 minutes). Friendster continued its rapid growth to 40 million monthly unique visitors in April, adding 18 million monthly unique visitors in the last year, or 78 percent annual growth.(1)

About Friendster

With more than 70 million members worldwide, Friendster is a leading global online social network. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them. Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, social groups, activities and interests. Friendster prides itself in delivering an easy-to-use, friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world via http://www.friendster.com or m.friendster.com from any Internet ready mobile device. Friendster has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking, with more expected over the next several months. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and individual investors. For more information, visit: http://www.friendster.com.

(1) comScore (http://www.comscore.com/) Media Metrix, April 2008 (2) InternetWorldStats.com (http://www.internetworldstats.com/), December 2007 (3) Analysis of Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) and InternetWorldStats.com data, April 1, 2008

SOURCE Friendster, Inc.

Send this news item to a friend.

Print This Page