The Four-eyed Journal » Friendster

What would I do with my exported Friendster account?

jhay — Sun, 01 May 2011 04:29:36 +0000

It was a decision I postponed some two years ago. When most of my real-life friends and acquaintances have been added to my list of friends on Facebook, the idea of deleting my Friendster acccount became so obvious.

However, my nostalgic part got the better of me and I decided to just let my Friendster account die a natural death. Now, the Friendster team is pushing us all to take a step lesser than that – exporting our Friendster account data. Photos, comments, profile information, blogs etc.

We have until the 31st of May because after that Friendster would go into a major reboot and delete all the remaining user information on the site.

At first I had decided on exporting my Friendster information, probably in the rare instance that I’d be interested in the new Friendster that would soon emerge. Then again there’s no assurance that would happen so I then questioned the sense of exporting the data at all.

What would I do with it? For archiving purposes? For old times’ sake? It would probably just a waste of my time, bandwidth and hard drive space to keep my Friendster information. But this is just me, how about you?

Would you export your Friendster information? What would you do with it afterwards?

Friendster Blogs 2.0 – now powered by WordPress

jhay — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:02:35 +0000

Finally, Friendster has leaped into the modern age and has upgraded its little-known blogging component, Friendster Blogs.

We’d like to introduce you to your new blog on Friendster! We’ve been very busy building out Friendster Blogs 2.0 and your blog has been moved to the new blogging platform. It’s ready for you to customize, edit, and add even more content to it!
Some things you should know about your new blog:

Your blog has been moved to the new platform.

It is likely that your blog layout or colors may not appear exactly as they were on your old blog, you can edit or add new customizations to your blog by clicking the ‘Design’ tab or ‘Change Theme’ button when you access your blog from your home page.

All of the photos you’ve uploaded to your old blog will soon be moved to your new blog. When they are moved, they will be in your Blogs Media Library (Manage –> Media Library). Don’t worry, we’ll move all your photos for you! We plan to have this complete by September 17th.

Friendster blogs 2.0

That new blogging platform is none other than the ever so popular WordPress. I’m not really a WP guru but from the looks of it, they’re using the latest version of WP MU. Good job to the Friendster Blogs team for seamlessly integrating WordPress’ dashboard into Friendster itself.

Now the Friendster blogs would load almost instantly unlike before where I would usually give up on it have forgotten about blogging on Friendster because it just takes ages for the blog to load. They have a decent amount of themes available though not as extensive as the collection found in WordPress.com blogs. I’m sure though that many more themes will be coming soon.

The need to maintain or open a Multiply.com or Blogger.com account if they want to go into blogging would diminish and I think there would be a resurgence of activity in Friendster, because these past few years of giving comments customizing one’s profile (usually to the detriment of the visitor’s browser or eyes), recycling memes over and over again on the Bulletin board, it’s been really boring! Hopefully this brilliant upgrade would entice more Filipinos to blog because almost every online Pinoy has a Friendster account.

But is it already too late for Friendster? Based on what I’ve seen, Multiply.com has beaten them to it.

MySpace on top but not in the Philippines

jhay — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 09:07:32 +0000

Friendster users wake up! MySpace has just made headlines when Hitwise has come out with a press release stating that “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites.”

It has even surpassed Google and Yahoo! according to Hitwise. Speaking of Yahoo!, Glen Chapman writes on Mail & Guardian Online about Yahoo! crying foul over the report of Hitwise that is has been overtaken by MySpace to become the most visited social networking site in the internet.

Yahoo! rejected the claim as “misleading” because it ranked the search engine’s domains such as search, news, and e-mail separately instead of adding them together.

MySpace.com got more online visitors than the Yahoo! or Yahoo! Mail websites last week, according to Hitwise, an online intelligence service based in New York City.

Yahoo! said it wasn’t accurate to compare MySpace traffic to that at one of the separate internet doors used to reach the Sunnyvale, California, company’s services.

“When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month,” the company said in a release.

Yahoo! calculated that it attracted 129-million unique visitors in the United States monthly while MySpace drew fewer.

Yahoo! contended it was the world’s most trafficked internet destination, with 500-million visitors monthly.

Well, it seems that all of this buzz is taking place outside the Philippine webspace as I did a quick search on Technorati and Pinoyblog.com and there is little talk about MySpace grabbing the top spot. I guess it’s a no brainer when considering the fact that Friendster seems to remain king of social networking sites here in the Philippines.

I consulted Google Trends to compare the amount of searches of the keywords ‘MySpace’ and ‘Friendster’ first in the global level for 2006 and I came up with this:

Are we Pinoys the only ones using Friendster nowadays? Then I did the same comparison but this time I told Google Trends to focus only on the searches from the Philippines for the same keywords ‘MySpace’ and ‘Friendster.’ The results were a complete reversal of things:

So again, here in the Philippines, just say social networking sites you will be answered with ‘Friendster’.

I just wonder how the other sites are doing if Friendster will ever loose its foothold in the Philippines.