NEWS

New Friendster CEO Richard Kimber in One of His First Interviews

Computerworld
August 14, 2008
By John Brandon

I talked to Richard Kimber, the new CEO of Friendster (as of August 4) about what the social networking site needs to do to muster support in the US. Some interesting insights: users spend 215 minutes per month at the site today; he sees the US site as a way to connect Asian-Americans with Asia; and they have launched roughly one new language version of the site every month, for the past nine months.

1. Friendster has recently taken on a "Big in Japan" reputation, where you are more widely used outside of the US. Is that going to become an on-going direction for the company?

Yes, we are focused on Asia and all people connected to Asia.

Friendster is the #1 social network in Asia, almost twice as big as any of our competitors. We have over 75 million registered users globally, and 55 million of those are from Asia-Pacific, so more than 70% of our users are in Asia. Also, daily traffic from Asia represents about 90% of all our traffic. We'll be ramping up our marketing, sales and engineering teams in Asia and building a bigger presence in our key markets like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and The Philippines. 80% of our new hires will be in Asia, and we'll be opening more regional offices in Asia soon.

2. What do you think you need to do to re-capture a US audience (and US advertisers)?

Today, Friendster is bigger in the US than it's ever been. We're going to continue to launch new features and monetization strategies globally and in the US. The US represents a great advertising market for us, and we are factoring in our US user base's feedback into all product development. We are taking an Asia-centric direction in the US, and will position ourselves as the primary and dominant social network between Asian-Americans and Asia.

3. What are some of the very latest trends in social networking? How are you changing to adapt to those trends?

The race is on for globalization and monetization. We're pursuing both in a variety of ways: we've launched 9 new languages in the past 9 months, and in doing so, we've expanded our addressable market to over 70% of the world's Internet population, or over 3/4 of a billion people.

We've also launched Friendster Mobile which is a suite of mobile offerings to address global mobile internet trends, especially those in Asia. Our mobile offerings have also been rolled out in multiple languages.
As for monetization, we're pursuing a variety of new revenue drivers in addition to our foundational advertising and sponsorship revenue plays. We'll share more information on those as we move forward.

4. What is the best solution for making apps that users can share between sites?

As more and more social networks open up and launch developer programs, there will increasingly be more opportunity for developers to build apps that span across multiple sites and allow users to connect across them. The largest cross-site, community driven initiative today is OpenSocial. It has become a de facto standard for developers of social applications and it makes it easier for developers to build and deploy applications across multiple destination sites. Friendster is a founding member of OpenSocial, and we're launching full support for OpenSocial shortly.

5. Do you think social networking can take up too much time for the average user?

That depends on who you are and what you're doing on them! Today social networks have the highest user engagement (minutes per unique user per month) than all other sites on the Web, and Friendster is the global leader in user engagement -- our users spend about 215 minutes, almost 4 hours, per month on our site. Given the value social networks provide, I think the time spent on them is worthwhile. After all, humans are social creatures!

6. A Harvard professor I talked to recently said social networking in its current form (blogging, friend requests, apps) is a trend that will be replaced by something else, possibly a much more advanced Twitter. How will you avoid being replaced?

We understand this space is constantly evolving and we're evolving with it. We also understand the key trends that drive user activity and we listen to what our users want. We've introduced a Twitter-like feature on both our Web site and on our mobile site at m.friendster.com. Users can post "shout-outs" which enable them to send a one-line broadcast message to their entire network. Shout-outs are aggregated on every user's homepage.

7. What will social networking look like in five years when we all have much faster Internet connections and the Web is even more pervasive?