Social Networking (Demo 2004 Series

Social Networking (Demo 2004 Series - 8) I've written a few times about Orkut and LinkedIn and the kind-of- funny-kind-of-strange infatuation with Orkut among the Digerati that seems to have peaked and now died off. Anyway, Friendster was demoing at Demo, so I had a chance to look and talk to them. I learned a few little things:

First off, Friendster has a strong Yahoo influence. I sense that maybe some of the people there came from Yahoo, which tells me that a likely direction for them is to be acquired by Yahoo at some point.

Friendster tries to position itself away from a dating service and more as a general purpose Sociall Networking service. When asked to compare themselves with Orkut and LinkedIn, they claimed to have some millions of users and far more than the other guys. Their comment about Orkut – "it’s 85% men" – tells me something about how they really perceive themselves.