Friendster

Friendster is an Internet social network service. The Friendster site was founded in Mountain View, California, United States by Jonathan Abrams in March 2002 and is privately owned. Friendster is based on the Circle of Friends and Web of Friends techniques for networking individuals in virtual communities and demonstrates the small world phenomenon. It currently has more than 85 million members worldwide and is mostly used in Asia. Based on Alexa.com, Friendster ranks 2nd most visited website in the Philippines. It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts. David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, said that "the biggest percentage of users is from the Philippines, clocking in with 39 percent of the site's traffic."

Also, it caters to men and women interested in meeting people due to different reasons. Such reasons are: looking for friends; looking for activity partners; relationship with men; relationship with women; or just looking around.

History
Friendster was funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital in October 2003 with a reported valuation of $53 million.

In April 2004, Abrams was removed as Chief Executive Officer and Jeff Koogle took over as interim CEO. Koogle previously served as President and CEO at Yahoo!. Koogle was replaced by Scott Sassa in June 2004, left in May 2005, and was replaced by Taek Kwon. Taek Kwon was succeeded by Kent Lindstrom. In August 2008, Richard Kimber, formerly Google's regional managing director of sales and operations for Southeast Asia, was hired as Chief Executive Officer.

Google offered to buy Friendster in 2003. Friendster, however, refused the offer.

Patent
Based on a June 16, 2003 application, Friendster was awarded a patent in 2006 for a method and apparatus for calculating, displaying and acting upon relationships in a social network. Dubbed the Web of Friends because the method combines the Circle of Friends with the Web of Contacts, the system collects descriptive data about various individuals and allows those individuals to indicate other individuals with whom they have a personal relationship. The descriptive data and the relationship data are integrated and processed to reveal the series of social relationships connecting any two individuals within a social network. The pathways connecting any two individuals can be displayed. Further, the social network itself can be displayed to any number of degrees of separation. A user of the system can determine the optimal relationship path (i.e., contact pathway) to reach desired individuals. A communications tool allows individuals in the system to be introduced (or introduce themselves) and initiate direct communication.

In Other Languages
Friendster's Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malay, and Thai sites exist as part of its main home page. A link in the site's upper right corner toggles between English to the other languages mentioned above.