MEDIA RELEASE PR37414
Friendster Launches New Brand Targeting Asian Youth
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 4 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --
New Brand and New Site to Focus on Local, Fun Experience
Friendster, Inc., a top global web site based on traffic, today announced
a new brand and web site packed with new features representing a significant
milestone in the company's history and further signifying the company's
evolution to focus on the Asian youth market. The notable changes include a
new fun-centric brand, and a redesigned web site with an emphasis on local
relevance, enhancing the overall user experience. The new direction and focus
reflect Friendster's dominant position among the youth audience in Asia.
"Our new brand is just one of the ways we are communicating the evolution
of our business as well as our commitment to our users - they've given us
great feedback and we've listened," said Richard Kimber, chief executive
officer at Friendster. "We understand our users and our major markets in Asia
better than anyone. This is just the beginning of a series of new products
and services catering to the needs of our users, and in a way unmatched by
any other social network."
Focus on Asian Youth
In 2003, Friendster pioneered social networking, and today is a leading
web site throughout Southeast Asia, with over 75 million registered users and
over 90 percent of daily traffic coming from the region. Today 80 percent of
Friendster users in Asia are aged between 16 to 24. The youth uses Friendster
to express themselves through their customization of the site, sharing
content and news with friends, and as a source of entertainment. The youth
user base enjoys local music, gifting, photo sharing, games, and using
Friendster on their mobile devices. All of these are represented today in
Friendster's product suite and will be further developed over time
specifically with the Asian youth in mind.
New Brand
At the center of Friendster's new identity is an energetic logo
symbolizing fun, personalization and individuality among youth. It's an
important visual identifier for the brand, crafted from a single line and
ending in a Friendster smile, creating Friendster's new wordmark. It
represents the brand's personality - fun, creative, friendly and personal.
The Friendster wordmark is housed within a green "word cloud." The word cloud
represents communication within a community, and truly depicts the essence of
Friendster's core user base. The new branding will also include a new
tagline: "Connecting Smiles." This tagline is Friendster's unique brand
promise and portrays what drives Friendster as a company and what the brand
means to its users-simply put, it represents the youth enjoying themselves
with their friends.
New Web Site
Building on Friendster's position as a leading social network, the
redesigned site is a clean, simple approach to sharing, communication and
self-expression. The new design also places emphasis on those features that
are favored by the Friendster community-like shoutouts, profile
personalization, photo sharing, games, finding friends, and messaging. Every
user's logged-in homepage includes a redesigned network activity Stream and
Shoutout publishing box, making it easier to keep track of everything friends
are doing, what content is being shared, what new photos have been uploaded
and more. Each user also has a new Shoutout history page called the Shoutout
Stream, where Shoutouts are aggregated, allowing users and their friends to
view historical Shoutouts, especially the ones they missed when they were
originally posted.
The new site is designed to be colorful, fun and easy to use. The global
site navigation bar and Friendster logo are in vibrant, bright green although
users can select their own color theme for their homepage and their site-wide
navigation bar at the top of every Friendster page. Given the importance of
customization to the users the user profile page has been enhanced and
redesigned, optimized for profile skins and themes from Friendster's
directory of skins or a user's own images, designs and colors. In addition to
the home and profile page, many of the popular pages have been redesigned to
simplify the site experience, including the friends, messages, comments,
photo browsing, and photo uploading pages. The primary features on these
pages have been optimized for usability, putting all the features Friendster
users love right at their fingertips, with games now available through the
'Fun' menu on the Navbar.
New Product Launches
- The Friendster Wallet is a new micro-payments platform that allows
users to purchase products and services on Friendster such as virtual
gifts, and to send and receive money to one another. The Friendster
Wallet enables users to store account balances and supports a variety
of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online
payments and credit card payments. Moving forward, Friendster will
enable users to make purchases surrounding online games and other
offerings. The Friendster Wallet is powered via a partnership with MOL
AccessPortal Berhad (MOL)*, a leading payments provider leveraging a
network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels worldwide.
-
The Friendster Gift Shop enables the Friendster community to send
virtual gifts to one another, quickly and conveniently. Friendster
Gifts are used to send personal gestures of kindness, celebrate
significant accomplishments, and recognize friends and family on
special days, like birthdays, or just for fun. A variety of gift themes
are supported and more will be added over time. Currently, users can
choose from virtual birthday gifts, collectible gifts, greeting gifts,
premium gifts, romance gifts, seasonal gifts, thank you gifts and more.
- Friendster Games is an online games destination, which will offer
Friendster users a wide variety of fun, entertaining games and
applications to play online with their friends. Building on the games
already available on the site (through the 'Fun' menu on the Navbar),
users will be able to easily search and bookmark the games they like to
play. Game developers will be able to incorporate The Friendster Wallet
into their games, allowing them to participate in the Friendster
micro-payments ecosystem.
"We look forward to delivering a great user experience and continued
product innovation surrounding our new brand and web site. We have a lot
coming in the weeks ahead - this is only the beginning," said Kimber.
About Friendster
With more than 115 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. Friendster is one of the best sites that allow people to meaningfully
participate with others in exciting and fun ways. Friendster prides itself in
delivering an easy-to-use, friendly and interactive environment where users
m.friendster.com from any Internet-ready mobile device. Friendster has a
growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking,
with more expected over the next several months. Headquartered in Mountain
View, California, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,
Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, IDG Ventures and individual investors.
* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
SOURCE: Friendster, Inc.
CONTACT: US Press,
Jeff Roberto,
+1-650-237-1411,
press@friendster.com,
or
International/Asia Press,
Nor Badron,
+65-9186-3010,
nor@friendster.com,
both of Friendster, Inc.
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