Amy's Robot

Friendster Goes (More) Corporate

Over a year after everybody in the universe got a Friendster account (including, of course, us--Friendster login req'd) Friendster is finally hitting the big time. They've got a new chief executive and a new plan for profitability through advertising. Whether or not they'll ever abandon their 'beta' status is anyone's guess, but if they're going to start selling ad space on their pages, they'd better clean up some of the many, many bugs that still mess up my profile all the time.

Apparently Friendster has 7 million members, but its daily usership has been declining for some time. From what I hear around the water cooler, people don't use it so much for dating or learning more about friends of friends of friends any more, but rather for creating funny pretend profiles for celebrities or fictional characters. Like the entire cast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the animatronic Christmas TV special from the 1960's--Hermie the Elf/Dentist is into oral hygiene and hardcore gay porn. (Friendster login req'd) (tx Jim.)

But despite failing public interest in Friendster, their announced intention to become a successful corporate entity has gained it some good business press coverage, as mentioned in the Washington Post article linked above. However, the Village Voice article quoted by the Post about this cool new online service called Friendster is, tellingly, a year old. The Wall Street Journal might care about the business prospects of a "hot" web-based company, but the kids seem to have stopped caring.

categories: Culture, Media, Technology
posted by amy at 1:00 PM | #