David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, revealed that a third of the traffic going to social networking site Friendster are contributed by Filipinos or at least the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are from the Philippines. An IP address is assigned for every country or city/specific location, in order to identify from where it is coming from, although a Proxy server may alter or altogether hide it.
Jones also revealed that of the 14 million Internet users in the Philippines as of 2007, 13.2 million of them logged into Friendster at one point or another.
Asia remains the biggest market for Friendster. If you mentioned Friendster to a US friend, you will be greeted with a puzzled look..Facebook and MySpace and to a certain degree Twitter, are the leaders in social networking in North America and Western Europe.
So why is Friendster lording it over the Philippines? My take is, it's not because it is the best social networking site. It is all about culture and basically it is because it has always been here first, or at least here first when the Personal Computer became more affordable to the masses. A classic case of correct timing.
In 2003, when i first signed up for Friendster, i got to know about Friendster when Digg founder Kevin Rose featured it in TechTv's Call For Help. TechTV was showing on a local channel practically on rotation, and was popular with the geekies. From there, i noticed that most of my friends also signed up for it, then the real essence of social networking caught off. Almost overnight, everybody is into Friendster, that is if you don't have one, you're an "outcast."
So there, it's all about networking and culture..Watch out, another social networking start up very popular here is Multiply, also an "aberration" than the more popular Wordpress or Blogger in the Western World.
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