Any port in a storm: Social network Friendster up for sale | VentureBeat

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Any port in a storm: Social network Friendster up for sale

July 27, 2009 | Eric Eldon

Popular-in-Asia social networking site Friendster is up for sale, according to banker documents obtained by TechCrunch . One of the earliest social networks, the company has been haunted by younger rivals, starting with MySpace, which became more popular in the US earlier this decade.

It’s not MySpace, though, that has followed Friendster across the Pacific to countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, where it was until recently most popular. It’s Facebook that’s been gaining ground.

In the last few months, Friendster has been showing a small drop-off in users, according to comScore. It still has more than 100 million total users, it claims. That’s not necessarily bad, and the cause for the drop-off is unclear. Maybe it was just a bad month or two. But Google Trends, which shows trends down to the day, is showing more dramatic falls for Friendster versus Facebook. Indonesia top, Philippines below.

Google Trends does not necessarily a trend make, but we’ve seen it presage other third-party data services in showing changes fast — like Twitter’s bumpy May traffic.

If Facebook is eating Friendster’s Asian lunch, the trend corroborates what a Singapore-based reader named Marcus wrote a year ago in reply to a post I’d written about Friendster’s growth in Asia.

Friendster was one of the more dominant players [earlier this ...

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