Friendster and Blogdrive

Gah, I hate that friends service. It just isn't my cup of tea to camwhore all day long. Besides, I hate to see other people more sexy than my sexy self. No room for competition.

The fundament power that drives these online social networks so successfully is non-other than social sex. Of course not directly, you can't expect them to "produce" a massaging hand out of the computer screen to give you any pleasure. It's more of a dating thing, they promise you sex and it's all up to you to bring it back home.

Friendster offers you an online profile, testimonials (from your friends), a kick-ass friends network, blog (typepad), personal messages, and other mini-and-cool-but-not-so-rare features such as css editing of your profile page.

I must say, the part I love most about friendster is the friend's network. It shows you who you connect with other people if they aren't immediately your friend. It's one of the best way to get a date make new friends.

Then there's the testimonial part to boost yer ego. You write something good about others, they'll write you back in return. The more testimonials you have prooves how likable you are and the more number of friends you have tells how popular you are.

Friendster makes it easy for you to stalk update on your friend's current affairs, much like how some personal blog works. It even allow you to stalk learn more about that hottie you met last week in the bar. (talk about privacy)

Brilliant, isn't it? Wait there's more. Friendster even allows you to blog. You hear that? Blogging, on Friendster. That's even more brilliant than sleeping naked. (right)

It does have some limitations which really isn't that much to complain about. To make custom templates is pretty tough there, it's all CSS. You have to find out all the classnames before you can come up with a CSS hack. But, I guess that's just about the only limitations.

Summary of what I like about Friendster:
1) Friends network
2) Testimonials


What can Blogdrive learn from Friendster?

Duh, the Friends Network. Blogdrive currently have profiles enabled for blog owners and there's also the tagging feature. Honestly I don't know what the tagging feature can really do other than a form of measurement who have seen your profile (or blog in some cases)

The new feature ideas would probably be something like this:
1) You are able to add Friends on your profile page,
2) You can see how other people connect to you,
3) You can leave a quick testimonial on the profiles page,
4) Personal Messages,


How would this benefit Blogdrive?

A wider userbase. Currently there are only around 300000 signed up accounts on Blogdrive including the abandoned/deleted account. That's a very small percentage in the world of online social/community. Wider userbase would also mean greater traffic and that would add to the bandwidth cost and server overload problems. But that would really depend on what they want really.

Note: Everything said here, just like everything else in this blog are my personal comments and observation and doesn't represent the views of our beloved Blogdrive.

Tags: Blogdrive, Friendster, Social Networking, Blogs, Friends Network,

BlogDrive Jumping on the Bandwagon

A few months ago, or rather one year ago we were seeing the quick boom of online social networking websites. First there was friendster, or some other companies like myspace, zorpia, hi5, ringo, facebook, bebo and many many others, I'm not even sure which one appear first but they all just sprung out of no where trying make their mark in the boom.

As far as I know, Friendster and Myspace are among the most popular social networking websites available. It is estimated that friendster may have over one billion users account, while Myspace claims they serve up to 10% of the entire internet's advertising. That's one very brave and bold statement to make.

In the past (in the web 1.0 period), there were different types of online community websites. They are mainly separated into several types: Blogs platforms, Social Networking, photo sharing/hostings, Music Sites, Forums. As each of these website develops, they started to attempt to synchronise each of these different types of websites into themselves. In the hope of gathering more users.

One of the very first social networking that did this was Zorpia, where many of it's ideas came from developing a photo sharing community, and Xanga (a journal type website) and social networking (friendster based). Not long after the idea became realise as a brilliant way of providing more features to their users and extending their userbase, Friendster acquired typepad (blog software) as their default bloggint tool. Myspace choose to develop their own blogging feature as well.

These are the big giants in the pioneering business of the new way of life.

The bigger giants started to jump in the bandwagon, Google acquired BlogSpot, Yahoo did 360 and MSN did MSN Spaces.

So what we'll be expecting to see in the very near future is a portal based on a combination of these:

Blogs + Social Networking + Photo/Music/Video sharing + Instant Messenger + Forums.

Of course, the giants that have the bigger advantage over other
companies in the long run due to their wide IM userbase, such as
Google, Yahoo and MSN.

BLOGDRIVE

In the way the direction of internet business is going, it makes sense that BD will probably be introducing more features to satisfy their users needs. Such as music hosting, video, networking, personal profiles and many more. It has been revealed, somewhat that videos are coming out? And that they are researching on Myspace, going into networking kinda thing.

We'll be expecting to see new features on Blogdrive. How soon I don't know but I'm excited to see the new features.

Hopefully we'll get to see some Personal Messaging thingy too.

Read about Hungry Media Companies find a Media Menu for websites to buy.

Next entry: How Friendster succeed in their business model and why?

Tags: blogdrive