Friendster Embraces Facebook F8 Platform
Published by Rodney Rumford October 3rd, 2008 in Friendster, business.
Friendster Embraces Facebook Platform: Social Site Friendster has just announced that it will now support applications that are built on the facebook F8 platform.
Friendster has only 22% overlap with Facebook, therefore 78 percent of Friendster’s 57 million monthly unique visitors – or 45 million monthly unique visitors – are incremental for Facebook developers. This is good news and I suspect that many facebook application developers will take advantage of this opportunity. Friendster was one the of the original social sites online.
Friendster also supports the Google OpenSocial protocol as well. This makes Friendster the first major social network to embrace BOTH F8 & OpenSocial. Freindster is making it as easy as possible to engage and leverage their audience.
“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.”
Facebook has stolen most of the headlines here in North America and friendster appeared to waning. However Friendster has actually moved it’s effort into Asia, where they have become the number one social network with ~ 60 million registered users and over 45 million monthly unique visitors. These are very impressive numbers.
As more social networks embrace and support the facebook platform; the value of facebook grows. This also means that companies now have an opportunity to put their applications in front of an even greater and more diverse audience.
Very cool. Is it an either or (ie ‘is your app an OS app or a FBML app?’) or does their system just take whatever code you do and figure out how to display it? Can I do an app that’s part FBML and part OS, just for kicks?
Robyn,
Great questions. There are modifications that most likely need to occur on the display or styling level (canvas size) for apps making the move over to friendster from facebook.
I strongly suspect that you can not do an app that is part fbml and part OS. I believe that you must declare one or the other. If anyone know for sure drop a comment here.