Networking site Friendster aims to ride asian internet boom

"Friendster is extremely posi¬tive about the potential of social networking in Asia," said David Jones, vice president for global marketing. "Asia is the largest and fastestgrow¬ing region of the world, with 38 per cent of the world's Internet users in Asia."

Jones said Friendster was a top10 website in the world based on traf¬fic and had achieved that scale based on a user base mostly in Asia.

He said Friendster also had an active and growing user base in Thailand.

"We think we have the poten¬tial to become one of the most popular social networks in Thailand because of the combination of all that we have to offer."

According to recent research by Universal McCann, there are 292 million Internet users in the world actively man¬aging a socialnetwork¬ing profile. That is about 20 per cent of the world's 1.4 bil¬lion Internet users. The number of Internet users, socialnetworking users and the adoption rate is like¬ly to grow.

"As a result, the socialnet¬working industry could be triple the size of today," Jones said. "That's why we are investing fur¬ther to continue to grow our user base and revenues from this rather large website and user base."

For this reason, we think sites like Friendster that are easytouse, interactive, fun and useful will be an appealing place for these new users to get started with social networking.

Jones predicted that using social networks could become just as common as using email.

Social networking sites like Friendster let users express themselves, share and communicate with one, several or all of their friends in many more ways than email, and these are better, easier and/or faster ways," said Jones.

Friendster recently appointed Richard Kimber as its new chief executive officer and a member of its board of directors.

As the new CEO, Kimber will lead Friendster's global business and guide operations in Asia and the US.

"With Friendster's increasing focus on Asia, I was hired to apply my deep experience in sales, operations, monetization and partnerships - all in the Asia Pacific region and for consumer Internet companies - to take Friendster to the next stage of its success," said Kimber.

Until recently, Kimber was Google's regional managing direc¬tor for South Asia.