Friendster

With more than 50 million members worldwide, Friendster is a leading global online social network. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them. Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. Friendster prides itself in delivering a clean, user-friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world. Friendster has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and individual investors.

History

Friendster was considered the top online social network service until around April 2004 when it was overtaken by MySpace in terms of page views, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Friendster has also received competition from all-in-one sites such as Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo! 360, and Facebook. Of late, newer websites like hi5 are posing new competition for friendster.

Google offered $30,000,000 to buy out Friendster in 2003, but they were turned down.

Friendster was funded by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital in October 2003 with a reported valuation of $53 million.

In April 2004, John Abrams was removed as CEO and Tim Koogle took over as interim CEO. Koogle previously served as President and CEO at Yahoo!. Koogle was later replaced by Scott Sassa in June 2004. Sassa left in May 2005 and was replaced by Taek Kwon. Taek Kwon was then succeeded by Kent Lindstrom, following a recapitalization by Kleiner and Benchmark that valued Friendster at less than one-twentieth its 2003 valuation.

Friendster's decision to remain private instead of selling to Google in 2003 is considered one of the biggest blunders of Silicon Valley, the Associated Press claims.