The Social

Online-invitation service Socializr is hoping to be the FriendFeed for your social life. The site announced on Wednesday that it now aggregates invitations from MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo's Upcoming, Meetup, Google Calendar, and industry leader Evite (owned by InterActiveCorp) in addition to letting members send their own invitations. The new feature is called "Event Connect."

Socializr, which was hatched by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, also has implemented Facebook Connect and MySpaceID so that members of those social networks can invite friends to Socializr events. A third new feature of Event Connect lets members tap into their accounts on any photo-sharing sites to pull in pictures.

You can't yet auto-sync your entire Socializr event listing with a calendar service, but Abrams said Event Connect beta testers have been requesting it and that it will probably get implemented down the road.

"The vision for Socializr was always to do more than to be a better Evite," Abrams explained to CNET News. Aggregating other invitation and event-listing services was "sort of something that people have been asking, 'Why hasn't anyone done this?' for ages."

There are plenty of event-listing services trying to take a bite out of the market share that Evite--and now Facebook's invitation service--has dominated for years. Abrams said that while Socializr is small, it's still well-positioned to grow.

"We're doing OK. We haven't taken over Evite yet, but they've been around for 10 years," he said, adding that the company is still prerevenue. "We have a lot of interesting ideas about ad revenue, but it's still premature for us. We're still only five people, and still in the product development and growth stage."

Social network Friendster announced Tuesday that it has been awarded its fourth U.S. patent, called "Compatibility Scoring of Users in a Social Network." It does pretty much exactly what it sounds like--it parses user profile data to find people who might be compatible as friends.

The social network, considered an also-ran in the U.S. but a much bigger phenomenon in a number of Asian countries--it has 65 million registered users in Asia--had its first patent granted in July 2006 and says that more are on the way.

"In just six years, social networking has become both an industry--since 8 of the top 20 largest Web sites in the world are social networks--and a critical platform for over half a billion Internet users globally to share, communicate, connect, and be entertained with existing and new friends, family, and colleagues," Friendster CEO Richard Kimber, whom the company hired from Google in August, said in a release.

"A core component of the evolution of social networks is the ability of the online 'social graph' to represent our real social life. Understanding the common interests between people establishes common ground to build and enhance relationships," he added.

In case you were keeping track, this patent is No. 7,451,161 and it was granted on November 11.

Developers who have created applications for Facebook's platform can now bring them over to social network Friendster. This means that Friendster supports both Facebook's code and OpenSocial, the standard created by Google for social-network widgets.

"Friendster's support of both the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms is a big win for business and individual developers, as well as for Friendster users," David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster, said in a release. "For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for them to 'port' these applications to Friendster...For Web 2.0 companies that have developed apps using Facebook and OpenSocial APIs, they now have the flexibility to choose between approaches when launching applications on Friendster."

Another social network, Bebo, now owned by AOL, announced that it would implement support for Facebook's platform late last year. Friendster marketing director Jeff Roberto told CNET News that Friendster entered into a licensing agreement with Facebook, which has since made most of its developer platform open source.

Could another social network do the same? Probably. "With an open platform, it's quite possible that others will embrace it," Roberto said.

Long before Facebook was a household word, Friendster was the first big social-networking site to take off in the U.S. But in 2004, plagued by technical problems, Friendster lost significant ground to MySpace (now owned by News Corp.) and later Facebook.

Since then, it's had quite a reincarnation. Friendster estimates that 78 percent of its 80 million users, like the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, do not use Facebook. If so, it would be to a developer's advantage to make an app available on both platforms.

In August, Friendster raised $20 million in venture funding and hired former Google employee Richard Kimber as CEO. Last December, it debuted its developer platform, and in September released OpenSocial support.

Updated at 7:24 a.m. PT on Tuesday with comment from Richard Kimber.

Brush off your Monty Python and the Holy Grail references: although long forgotten by social-media junkies in the United States, Friendster is not dead yet. The pioneering social network announced on Tuesday that it has raked in $20 million in venture funding led by IDG Ventures and has hired Richard Kimber as its new CEO.

Kimber was hired from Google, of all places, where he served as the regional managing director in Southeast Asia. That's key for Friendster, which has seen most of its recent growth in the Asia-Pacific region, to the point where it's now the No. 1 social network in countries such as Singapore, as well as the Asian leader overall, according to ComScore. Friendster has been translating the site into different Asian languages and focusing on growth there rather than trying to patch things up in the States.

He takes over from Kent Lindstrom, who will remain on Friendster's payroll after serving as CEO since early 2006. Founder Jonathan Abrams left amid the site's U.S. decline, and he now runs an invitation start-up called Socializr.

"Friendster is growing at an enormous rate in Asia-Pacific and is clearly leading the competition. I believe this is partly because the Internet is transforming the lives of everyone, and it will probably become one of the greatest liberators of our time," Kimber said in a statement that seemed tinged with mild political undertones. "I look forward to growing our business further, as we continue our global growth and strong focus on Asia."

Kimber insisted in an interview on Tuesday that he hadn't implied anything political. "It's more about the fact that the Internet enables...people to connect with people that they haven't been able to connect with," he explained. "I really do think social networking has a very important role to play alongside the access to information."

When it does come to dealing with governments that might not adhere to U.S. standards of free speech, Kimber said the company is well-prepared. "Like all social networks, we are very much in touch with all the government agencies and the like. We have a massive user base already, and we're very much on the forefront of how this whole industry evolves," he said. Referring to his experience at Google, he added, "I've had a lot of dialogue with regulators throughout the area."

Indeed, to fuel that growth, the company has raised $20 million. IDG Ventures was joined in the round by all of Friendster's previous investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, and the Founders Fund (which also invested in Facebook). The last round of funding the company raised was $10 million just less than two years ago.

Kimber said the latest round will be used to hire more employees, specifically engineering talent, and opening more offices across the Asian continent. He named Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia as four countries where he'll have an executive presence.

Friendster has more than 75 million members to date. While many are still in the States, Kimber said the company will maintain its Asia-centric strategy and that any U.S. marketing will be targeted toward audiences with close ties to Asian countries.

"We're continuing to focus on the international component of the U.S. market: Americans that are interested in Asia and that have connections in Asia," he said. "We're going to pursue a segment strategy for the U.S. and then a much broader strategy in Asia."

Friendster has fully launched its developer platform with more than 180 applications available to its 56 million registered users, the social-networking site said Tuesday.

The company first announced the platform on October 25.

The developer platform was initially piloted by some well-known names in the widget world: Slide, RockYou, Imeem, Jangl, Clearspring, and Gbox. Companies and individual developers participating in the program are allowed to advertise anywhere in the application space and keep all revenue.

According to the social network, the platform is going to be as "open" as possible to make it easy for applications designed for other sites to make their way to Friendster, and vice versa. Friendster is a partner in the Google-led OpenSocial initiative and has said that OpenSocial APIs will be integrated into the Friendster Developer Platform when the much-stalled OpenSocial is "completed and secure."

This is not the first time that we've seen an OpenSocial partner go ahead and launch its own developer platform before Google's standard has gone live; business networking site LinkedIn announced its InApps platform earlier this week.

A victim of the soaring popularity of MySpace.com and then Facebook, Friendster has fallen from favor in the U.S. But the company currently claims a large chunk of the social-networking market share in the Asia-Pacific region--a fact that prompted Friendster to start launching versions of the site in different languages in the fall. Some of Friendster's developer applications reflect this: Yobo.com, for example, has created a Chinese-language music discovery application.

Onetime social-networking leader Friendster has announced a new feature called "Fan Profiles," which is essentially a way for celebrities, bands, companies, nonprofit organizations and other entities to self-promote.

Among "early adopters" of the new feature are Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, comedian Dane Cook, and pop-punk band Fall Out Boy, all of which now have "fan profiles" on the social network.

The formal announcement was made at a press lunch at the DigitalLife consumer technology trade show in New York on Thursday.

It's an ambitious move for the struggling social network, but one that likely won't give it more traction in its struggle to reclaim the market share it's lost to Facebook and MySpace.com. Friendster, it should be noted, claims to have a solid footprint in the Asia-Pacific region (35 million of its 50 million users are based there), which led the company to introduce a Chinese version of the site earlier this week.

A Friendster 'fan profile' for a band

(Credit: Friendster)

Unlike MySpace, which groups bands' and politicians' profiles along with regular user pages in members' friends' lists (that's why Barack Obama can be in your "top eight"), Friendster is attempting to differentiate itself by, well, differentiating.

A "fan profile" is a separate kind of account than a regular Friendster profile and is listed differently in friends lists as a result. The interface is slightly different, and there are more robust features for contact list management and mass e-mails. Fan profiles are better optimized for Web searches like Yahoo and Google--which, on the flip side, means that this could be a dual move to boost Friendster's traffic.

And it appears that not just anyone can get one. There's a special page where artists and organizations can request Friendster fan profiles.

But here's something in the Friendster press release that sounds a little bit questionable: "Fan Profiles contain a bulk invitation feature, which enables mass fan requesting via contact lists."

The phrase "bulk invitation" doesn't bode well, as this raises the possibility of mass spamming with the name "Friendster" involved. Additionally, "your fans receive updates every time you edit your profile, update your blog, upload photos or embed content."

This just doesn't sound like a good idea. People don't like to be the recipients of mass e-mails from social-media sites. Just ask Plaxo.

On the surface, the "Fan Profiles" launch doesn't look like it'll do much to ameliorate Friendster's problems. The social-media world could be surprised, for all we know. But it's highly doubtful.

Social-networking pioneer Friendster might have been losing out to rivals Facebook and MySpace for some time now, but the company isn't giving up any time soon. The San Francisco-based company announced on Monday evening that its site is now available in traditional Chinese in addition to English.

This is a strategic move for Friendster, as numbers have shown that it's far from dead in the Asia-Pacific region, where 35 million of its 50 million users are based--in fact, ComScore numbers have indicated that with global growth taken into account, Friendster is growing more quickly than MySpace. Traditional Chinese, the company noted, is used by 16 percent of Internet users.

Unlike MySpace, which operates a number of international verticals in different languages, Friendster's Chinese version will exist atop the same domain as its English-language site. This way, English-speaking users will be able to network with Chinese-speaking users and vice versa.

According to a release from the company, "While other social networking sites create separate sites for different countries and make it difficult or impossible to have international friend networks, Friendster is the first global online social network to employ this approach to allow and encourage multi-cultural exchange and communications among users around the world who are interested in doing so."

Social networking's other big name, Facebook, does not operate any versions of the site in languages other than English.

Statistics house ComScore released some numbers on Tuesday pertaining to how quickly a handful of popular social-networking sites are growing worldwide, and which ones dominate in which regions of the globe. There's nothing all too notable here, as the global reach of various social-networking sites has been well-documented already--and even mapped. But it's always cool to see numbers, which I suppose is why companies like ComScore exist in the first place.

The main set of numbers tracks worldwide social-networking growth, with June 2006 and June 2007 as the benchmarks, for seven services: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, and Tagged. Tagged, one of the smaller and newer of the bunch, showed the greatest overall growth--a 774 percent increase from 1,506,000 unique visitors in June 2006 to 13,167,000 unique visitors in June 2007. That could be because the San Francisco-based social network simply wasn't on the map until recently; it was founded in 2004 but scored its first round of venture capital in February 2006.

Facebook has, as one may imagine, also grown quite a bit--270 percent, from 14,083,000 uniques to 52,167,000. ComScore charts Bebo as having grown about 172 percent, and Orkut as having grown about 78 percent.

Friendster might be considered an also-ran, at least in the U.S., but according to ComScore's statistics, it's growing almost as quickly as MySpace: 65 percent versus 72 percent. That being said, Friendster's unique visits went from around 15 million to around 25 million, while MySpace's went from about 66.5 million to over 114 million, so we're clearly dealing with vastly different magnitudes here.

Interestingly enough, Hi5, which I've heard talked about as a rising star in the social-networking world, has been growing at a crawl compared with the others--only 56 percent growth from June 2006 to June 2007.

The ComScore statistics also charted where visits to social-networking sites are coming from, based on worldwide region: Out of the seven social-networking sites, the two with the most "balanced" user bases worldwide are Tagged and Hi5. Tagged, according to the ComScore numbers, has 22.7 percent of its base from North America, 14.6 from Latin America, 23.4 from Europe, 10 from Africa and the Middle East, and 29.2 percent from Asia and the Pacific region. Hi5, similarly, is 15.3 percent North American, 24.1 percent Latin American, 31 percent European, 8.7 percent African/Middle Eastern, and 20.8 percent Asia-Pacific.

MySpace and Facebook both have large percentages of their users in North America (62.1 percent for MySpace, 68.4 percent for Facebook) with sizeable portions in Europe (24.7 percent for MySpace, 16.8 percent for Facebook) and single-digit numbers in all other regions. Bebo, most popular in the U.K., is largely the opposite, with 62.5 percent of its users based in Europe, 21.8 percent in North America, and few elsewhere.

Orkut, famous for having a user base virtually restricted to Brazil and India, understandably has almost half its user base in Latin America, almost half in Asia-Pacific, and almost none anywhere else. Friendster, meanwhile, leans the most disproportionately toward a single geographic market: it gathers nearly 89 percent of its user base from the Asia-Pacific region.