facebook vs friendster

It's an odd match-up. One is the top social networking site worldwide, while the other is the top social networking site in only one region. Are there more similarities or more differences between these two social networking giants?

Facebook - The King of Social Networking

Facebook's rise to fame can be attributed to its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg's personality as a meek and yet intelligent geek fresh out of college has somehow been embedded in Facebook. And so, it quickly drew the young crowd. With its fun features, eventually Facebook became a force to contend with in the social networking arena. You've read about it's history. You've read how Zuckerberg has catapulted Facebook into fame. But what really is in Facebook that makes it click with social networking fans?

Simple, Vibrant, and Clean Homepage

I remember when I first visited Facebook. I must admit that I was pretty impressed by its interface. The no-nonsense Facebook homepage emits an air of friendliness. The very accessible features that have grown steadily through the years were enough to make you stick with using it. Once you get to connect to a lot of your friends, sharing photos, updates, and fun stuff with each other - that's when you know that you have been Facebooked!
Aside from its design, its the value-added, plain old fun features of Facebook may keep you glued to the site. Whether you are posting to a friend's fun wall or creating a photo album for all the rest of your contacts to view, Facebook is a robust, fast-loading website with powerful interactive features. Add in the ability to customize your pages with Facebook "apps," and the site becomes a even more powerful force to contend with.
Facebook truly is the "Google" of social networking sites, and it would take a lot to displace it from its current position.

history

mark zuckerberg created facebook
in his harvard dorm room.

Mark zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not, according to the Harvard Crimson.^[ According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos, and basic information and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what   later became Facebook.

Simple, Vibrant, and Clean Homepage

I remember when I first visited Facebook. I must admit that I was pretty impressed by its interface. The no-nonsense Facebook homepage emits an air of friendliness. The very accessible features that have grown steadily through the years were enough to make you stick with using it. Once you get to connect to a lot of your friends, sharing photos, updates, and fun stuff with each other - that's when you know that you have been Facebooked!
Aside from its design, its the value-added, plain old fun features of Facebook may keep you glued to the site. Whether you are posting to a friend's fun wall or creating a photo album for all the rest of your contacts to view, Facebook is a robust, fast-loading website with powerful interactive features. Add in the ability to customize your pages with Facebook "apps," and the site becomes a even more powerful force to contend with.
Facebook truly is the "Google" of social networking sites, and it would take a lot to displace it from its current position. 

Here is a list of the 20 countries with the fastest growing number of Facebook users:

Rank	Country	Number of Facebook users July 2008	Number of Facebook users July 2009	12 month growth %
1	Indonesia	209,760	6,496,960	2997.2%
2	Romania	9,060	230,600	2445.3%
3	Slovakia	27,960	588,860	2006.1%
4	Czech Rep	51,860	1,088,020	2005.3%
5	Italy	491,100	10,218,400	1980.7%
6	Philippines	162,640	2,719,560	1572.13%
7	Argentina	417,980	4,906,220	1073.8%
8	Uruguay	40,920	395,800	867.3%
9	Taiwan	71,340	685,460	860.8%
10	Portugal	48,180	425,680	783.5%
11	Brazil	119,080	1,015,400	752.7%
12	Spain	695,900	5,773,200	729.6%
13	Paraguay	7,920	63,740	704.8%
14	Poland	83,180	619,180	644.4%
15	Bulgaria	60,240	436,480	624.6%
16	Austria	111,060	728,800	556.2%
17	Slovenia	53,740	343,320	538.9%
18	Lithuania	24,320	153,160	529.8%
19	Thailand	114,180	697,340	510.7%
20	Russia	67,760	412,840	509.3%

Facebook, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States[1]
Founder	Mark Zuckerberg Chris Hughes Dustin Moskovitz Eduardo Saverin
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California Dublin, Ireland (headquarters for Europe, Africa, Middle East) Seoul, South Korea (headquarters for Asia) Wellington, New Zealand(headquarters for Oceania)
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Mark Zuckerberg (CEO) Chris Cox (VP of Product) Sheryl Sandberg (COO)
Revenue	▲ US$800 million (2009 est.)[2]
Employees	1400 (2010)[3]
Website	facebook.com
Alexa rank	▬ 2 (August 2010)[4]
Type of site	Social network service
Advertising	Banner ads, referral marketing, Casual games
Registration	Required
Users	500 million[5] (active in Jul. 2010)[N 1]
Available in	Multilingual
Launched	February 4, 2004
Current status	Active

Friendster-Asia's Top Social Networking Site

If you go around and start asking people from Asia if they know what social networks are - they would probably say Friendster. That's because Friendster has become the icon of social networking in Asia. People just love the way Friendster has managed to bridge the digital divided among long-lost friends, classmates, and fellow alumni. I've even heard how many have met their true loved ones because of Friendster. What makes Friendster tick among Asian social networking users is the fact that it is so easy to use and yet packed with fun features.
For example, the hyperlinked profile information of its members is a great way of finding other people of similar interests to you. And recently Friendster has started to open up its platform to third-party application developers.
Hence, Friendster is threading the path taken by Facebook. It will just be a matter of time before Friendster is able to catch up with Facebook and MySpace. Gradually Friendster is extending its reach beyond Asia and onwards to the world. If Friendster manages to break out from its exclusively Asian reputation and establish itself as a global social networking site, it might well be on its way to becoming the major competitor of Facebook.

Friendster is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California.The service allows users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users may share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network.Friendster has over 115 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors a month globally. The website receives approximately 19 billion page views per month, and is in the top 500 global websites based on web traffic.Over 90% of Friendster's traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network. The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia,South Korea, the United States, Singapore, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India.

Services

In November 2009, Friendster announced a global partnership with MOL AccessPortal Berhad (MOL), a leading payments provider leveraging a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels worldwide, to power the Friendster Wallet and a payments platform enabling micro-spending for over 115 million users on Friendster. The Friendster Wallet will support a variety of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments.

Fan Profiles: Fan Profiles encompass over 40 different types of "entities – including artists, celebrities, models, musicians and organizations. Such entities can create a "Fan Profile" which helps them promote themselves and build a fan base on Friendster. Fan Profiles are also accessible to non-Friendster members via search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. 

Friendster Mobile and Friendster Text Alerts: Friendster mobile (m.friendster.com) is free for users from any web-enabled mobile deviceand is available globally. Friendster mobile is available in several languages in addition to English (Indonesian, Malay, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese). Friendster users in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines can subscribe to and receive SMS text alerts on their mobile devices for network activity and friend related updates.

Languages: Languages include Filipino, Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Until September 2007, Friendster was only available in English. 10 new languages were added from 2007 up to January 2009, with Filipino being the newest language to be included. Users can also enter content on Friendster in any language.

Friendster launched all language support on a single domain - www.friendster.com. Friendster is the first global online social network to support Asian languages and others on a single domain so that users from around the world can talk to each other.

Over 70% of the world's Internet users can now use Friendster.

Friendster Developer Program: Friendster has been an open site since August 2006 when it first began allowing widgets and content to be embedded in user profile pages. Roughly 39 percent of Friendster's users have widgets on their profile.

Friendster gives software developers access to APIs that utilize content and data within the Friendster network to build and deploy customizable applications on and off Friendster. Friendster's Developer Program is an open, non-proprietary platform with an open revenue model.

Friendster was the first to support both the OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform.

Friendster Relaunch: On 10 December 2009 Friendster relaunched its new website with a new interface in conjunction with its new financial acquisition by Malaysian Company - MOL Global ( Affiliation with Malaysia Berjaya Group )

Friendster, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	2002
Headquarters	Mountain View, California
Key people	Ganesh Kumar Bangah, Group Chief Executive Officer Andy Spillane, President Francis Wong, Vice President of Finance Cheryl Goh, Vice President of Products Aaron Barnes, Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development Ben Dunn, Vice President, Philippines and Global Head of Brand Experience Karin Visnick, Vice President, Business Operations
Website	www.friendster.com
Alexa rank	▼ 474 (July 2010)[1]
Type of site	Social network service
Advertising	Banner ads, Contextual ads, Sponsorships
Registration	optional
Users	8.2 million (June 2010)[2]
Available in	English, Tagalog, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Bahasa, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish
Launched	March 22, 2002
Current status	active

FOR ME..........

For me,i'll go rather to facebook than friendster,because all of us and almost the people in this world are using facebook for their communication,searching for friends or lost companions,for business purposes,gamings,ads,etc.and this is the most popular social networking website in this whole wide world! I thank you! bow! :))

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster