/Friendster loses the Philippines

Friendster loses the Philippines

Friendster was the first social network to make some noise. But that was back in 2003, when the Democrat candidate John Kerry used it to get some donors. He got the money but not enough votes. Friendster got quite popular but it was not technically good enough to support this number of users and people started to get tired. So they moved to other networks. Mainly to MySpace.

Even though, Friendster remained popular in some countries. Mainly in Indonesia and the Philippines, two places in which English is widely spoken and connections are not as fast, so people don’t really notice the slow servers. Until now. I have learnt, via my friend Thomas Crampton, that Facebook has become the main network in the Philippines. He quotes Dominique Anne explaining what and why it happened.

According to her, Facebook was stronger as it had more and better functionalities, specially the status updates. I don’t totally agree with that. Friendster could make a good enough service for most people. What makes the difference is that Facebook has the network effects advantage. As more people use Facebook, it is becoming more and more necessary to be there. Other general networks have to become niche ones.