I was in a seminar yesterday, and it really amazes me how many Filipinos there are in Friendster. Friendster was the original of the so-called social networking sites, and when it debutted in 2003, it grew so fast that it was heralded as one of the best inventions of 2003 by Time Magazine, and Jonathan Abrams the founder was called by Entertainment Weekly as the “Friendliest man of the Year”.
Friendster opened in March 2003, and by June, it had already 835,000 members, and scarecely four months later, it had over 2 million members, generating over 10 million page views per day. For a while, Friendster was touted to be the harbinger of the dot com renaissance after it crashed in 2001.
However, the growth sputtered off, and I just saw a recent analysis in INC Magazine, and one of the defining points was that while they were touting that they had so many members, they noted sometime early 2004 why the traffic would be mostly at around midnight their time, and suddenly they found out that a big part of their members was actually from the Philippines!
The article said that it created an emergency on their part, and actually derailed plans, because that was something they did not expect. When you have lots of traffic, you tout it to advertisers, but advertisers advertise only if the demographics is what they want. Suddenly, they say, where do you get US advertisers to pay up if it was attracting eyeballs that were in the Philippines, who , in the most American advertiser’s thinking wouldn’t necessarily be the market for their products, and therefore would make them hesitate to advertise.
Other than this, there were also technological and structural issue in the company, and pretty soon, Friendster lost to MySpace. For instance, by end of 2004, it overtook Friendster in terms of membership, ad by September of 2005, MySpace was seen as having 22 million users while Friendster was stuck with just over a million.
Right now, Friendster is billed as an also run in the social networks place. It is 13th place in the US, and its market share is perceived to be less than 1 percent. However, the Filipinos continued to be big here. It is perceived that Friendster has probably a few million members in the Philippines!
Another thing that is perceived to be really hot but seem to be not as successful was the idea to provide free wireless internet through WiFI technologies. Many cities were perceived to be starting that, notably San Francisco, London, Philadelphia, Portland and Taipei, but the latest reports say that many of them are finding it hard to be sustainable.
For instance, in Lompoc California, which is a $3 million project to provide WiFi to a city of 42,000 only has a few hundred subscribers. Earthlink, which installed in New Orleans, Milpitas, Anaheim and Philadelphia was said to only have 2,000 customers. MetroF which installed the WiFi in Portland said that about 1,000 use the network on any given day.
Municipal WiFi projects use the same technology as those used in coffee shops and airports. However, the problem is that for WiFi is really designed to be used in smaller quarters not citywide deployments. For instance, the signals are not good in penetrating walls, and since the user has to be no farther than 300 to 500 feet from the access point, that normally means that the provider has to put up as man as 25 access points per square mile., so network costs really zoom up. If the provider scrimps, it can also mean spotty or bad signals which discourages users.
Probably, when new technologies like WiMax, which can do much longer ranges come up, it will be easier. But for now, many people I know also use cell signals using 3G, and HSDPA technologies. This one is truly ubiquituous because in most places where there are a signal, you can also easily surf. Whatever technologies win, we can look forward that it will be easier and cheaper hopefully to be in touch at all time.