Be Smart

Remember Friendster? Many of us created Friendster accounts way back when, but then along came MySpace, and then Facebook, and well, we just plain forgot about little old Friendster. Poor Friendster, the forgotten, dowdy older sister.

But, wait, what's this? According to a story in VentureBeat, Friendster is actually a contender in the competition for global domination of the social networking market. No! Really? In what alternative universe?

Well, in the universe where there's a little country called "China" with a population of over 1.3 billion people. Friendster's user base has nearly doubled in the past year due to growth in Asia, with versions available in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish and Malay.

Developers knocking each other over for a share of the market for Facebook applications, should perhaps pay more attention to opportunities to create applications for the growing Friendster crowd, which has been building its own developer platform. The underdog in me is rooting for Friendster in its second act (but still wishing it looked a little better after all these years).