Friendster Parners With Google, Aims At Friends & Family Market

Las Vegas is bustling with conferences this week, including the Digital Hollywood conference that's attracting startup executives focused on Web 3.0 and social networking. It's a good thing for me. That's why I had a chance to sit down with Friendster CEO Kent Lindstrom, who has been at the helm for the last nine months. Lindstrom gave me the skinny on what's new at Friendster.

Friendster - the pioneer social network founded in 2002 by Jonathan Abrams - is going to partner with Google (GOOG) to place ads on the community site and to power the search technology. It's a deal similar to the Google/MySpace partnership inked last year. The financials were not disclosed for the approximately two-year deal. Of course, Friendster's sub-1 million monthly unique visitors pale in comparison to MySpace, so it's hardly close to the $900 million that Google agreed to pay News Corp (NWS) to be the ad provider and exclusive search engine for Fox's online properties, including MySpace. By partnering with Google, Friendster will stop using Yahoo (YHOO) as its search engine.

OK. So, the big question is: How is Friendster going to compete with MySpace? Some say the battle to be the king of the social network space is over and MySpace has won.

Lindstrom would agree. He thinks MySpace is the social network for entertainment/media and Facebook is the network for colleges. But he'd argue that there isn't a dominant social network that focuses on friends and family. He's positioning Friendster to be a social network for the single, young professional right after college who wants to just stay in touch with friends.

Comments

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2007 Jan 11 12:20 AM