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September 24, 2007

Friendster Plays To Strengths, Launches In Chinese

Michael Arrington

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Friendster is back, at least in Asia.

The social network that was the coolest thing on the block until MySpace came around has been slowly regaining its reputation and users over the years, and now boasts 50 million registered user and 27.4 million monthly unique visitors. The only problem (if you call it a problem) is that, like Orkut, most of those users are outside of the U.S. Specifically, they’re in the Asia/Pacific region - 24 million of the total 27.4 million unique monthly visitors come from there, as do 35 million of the 50 million registered users.

So it’s no surprise that the social network is playing to its strengths and launching its first non-English version, in traditional Chinese. This isn’t a separate website or URL; users simply click to Chinese to have the content localized to that language. User generated stuff remains in the original language.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Biteme!

    September 24th, 2007 at 8:11 pm

    Hey mike… How about creating Techcrunch China?

  2. Ritu

    September 24th, 2007 at 8:33 pm

    with Chinese population it seems like everything should be in Chinese version as well. Can you imagine, if only 20% of the population uses the site that would convert into a huge traffic and popularity for the site

  3. Brett

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:15 pm

    The choice of Traditional Chinese is interesting. Traditional Chinese is officially only used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, not mainland china (although most mainland chinese can read traditional).

    If it was a serious mainland chinese play, they’d have made a simplified chinese version. This move is more targeted at taiwan, hong kong and chinese communities abroad….

    I wonder when FB will go multilingual? I’ve seen my friend’s “xiaoneiwang” which is a total chinese FB rip off… even the logo looks the same!

    Except on xiaoneiwang they can customize the backgrounds of their profiles n stuff, and it’s still limited only to school/uni students.

  4. Marcelo

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    Thats very “Friendily”. Thanks for the sugestion!

    Marcelo

  5. Mr. Recycle

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:22 pm

    I think they should have launched the tagalog version first if they are really interested in their “asian” users. Enjoy the $.000000000001 CPM.

  6. Steve Ballmer

    September 24th, 2007 at 9:41 pm

    (汉语/漢語, Fake; 华语/華語, Ballmer; 中文, Rules

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

    汉语/漢語 华语/華語

  7. Otis Gospodnetic

    September 24th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    I was going to make a comment that Brett above already made. That is precisely the reason why the first Chinese version of Simpy is in Simplified Chinese and not traditional (c.f. http://www.simpy.com/faq#browserLanguage for languages supported).

  8. Wes

    September 24th, 2007 at 10:36 pm

    The Chinese move makes a lot of sense just because of the population there. Its also clever idea to try and venture where your rivals haven’t been and I think this should help in the revival of Friendster.

  9. phenom

    September 25th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    Globalization
    http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

  10. johntarter

    September 25th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    Getting in on the chinese growth is fantastic in theory, but what about execution… Can anyone tell me the CPM for chinese websites? The fact is advertisers, not just online advertisers, are stingy as hell in China and this will not change in the immediate future.

  11. Otis Gospodnetic

    September 25th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

    Btw. doesn’t that mean Friendster is going directly for the same crowd that uses Xanga? In other words, far east, starting with China. I think so…

  12. Ari

    September 27th, 2007 at 3:25 am

    Even with a low CPM, localization into the languages of their main markets was something Friendster should have done years ago.
    And now only Traditional Chinese?

  13. Lily

    October 3rd, 2007 at 3:24 pm

    This is in response to the comment left by Mr.Recycle… Do yourself a favor and Recycle your foolish thoughts back into the trash where nobody wants it.

    Don’t hate others because your company couldn’t think of it first.

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