| Status | Privately Held |
| Website | www.friendster.com |
| Category | Software |
| help@friendster.com | |
| Address |
568 Howard Street San Francisco, CA, 94105 USA |
| Employees | 465 |
| Founded | 1/01 |
| Total | $25.4M |
| Series A, 12/02 1 Battery Ventures | $2.4M |
| Series B, 10/03 2 Battery Ventures Benchmark Capital Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers | $13M |
| Series C, 8/06 3 Benchmark Capital DAG Ventures Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers | $10M |
Founded in 2002, Friendster is one of the web’s older social networking services. Adults, 18 and up can join and connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. The site currently has over 50 million users.
It’s rumored that Google offered $30M to buy Friendster in 2003 (when the company looked very promising), but was turned down. Things have somewhat changed since then though. Friendster failed to become what MySpace and Facebook are today largely because of its inability to scale with the growing demand. Since 2004, Friendster has gone through five different CEOs.
Friendster was the 2007 recipient of the Webware 100 Award for best community site. The company has also been granted a number of social networking focused patents.
Friendster’s competitors include Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Piczo, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Visible Path and others.
| Website | www.friendster.com |
| Tags | social-network, friends, network, social-networking |
Friendster is really a lot like Facebook, MySpace and many other social networks. Users can create personal profiles, join groups, upload photos, share videos, leave comments on each other’s pages and pretty much everything else you would expect from a social network.
The site has 50 million registered users (most of which are outside the U.S.), which isn’t something to sneeze at. Users can customize their page using HTML and CSS. In addition, Friendster is viewable in both Chinese and English.
