INDONESIA HOTLINE

SINGAPORE: With a fresh injection of US$20 million (S$27.7 million) in funding and a new chief executive, Friendster is setting its sights on growing its Asian operations.

"Social networking in Asia is growing at an amazing rate and Friendster is in front at the moment with a very clear leadership in this space," said Mr Richard Kimber.

The former Google managing director joined Friendster as chief executive on July 31. Mr Kent Lindstrom, who headed the company as president, will stay on as senior vice-president of corporate development.

Although Facebook and MySpace are making inroads globally, Friendster claims that it is the top social networking website in Asia, with over 55 million users in the region out of 75 million worldwide.

Quoting statistics from IT research firm comScore, Friendster said roughly three-quarters of all Web users in Singapore visit Friendster each month. Friendster had 907,000 unique visitors from Singapore in May, compared to Facebook which had 533,000.

A substantial part of the US$20 million will be used to expand its Asian operations. Friendster has an office in the Philippines and Mr Kimber said the company plans to open offices in Singapore and other Asian cities. "Asia not just one region, it's a sequence of very interesting and diverse cultures and economies. If you intend to be successful in multiple Asian countries, it shows that you have the ability to adapt and offer a flexible service," he said.

Friendster supports 10 languages, eight of which are Asian languages like Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia.

Users will see Friendster expand its mobile services to include micro-blogging features that websites like Twitter and Facebook sport. Micro-blogging allows users to update their contacts via short messages online.

"We have Twitter-like functionality on our mobile Web service and that has been very actively adopted in Asia. Twitter-type functions work really well on mobile phones so at Friendster, we think that's the area to focus on because people want to send short comments quickly while they're on the road," the new chief executive told Today.

Friendster is also working on monetising its business. "There's still a long way to go in terms of advertising on social networks. In terms of building targeted and broad advertising campaigns, social networks have the benefit of doing both," he said. "We're going to look at new monetisation streams from our mobile services, and from other applications like virtual goods and gaming."

Mr Kimber also wants to encourage entrepreneurs. He said that it is "going to be an interesting, exciting development because it offers all the Asian startups" a way of using Friendster to distribute their ideas