Friendster’s lunch Treat for Filipino Tech Bloggers

Yesterday, I was invited to a Filipino Tech bloggers event (lunch) to meet with the Global head of brand experience and Vice President of Friendster Philippines, Mr. Ben Dunn. We were able to do an open forum on Friendster and discussed how Friendster regain its status…

… Although it was on a light note, a lot of us started really hitting Friendster hard. Saying what we thought was wrong with Friendster and how we believe that more people are going to leave it for Facebook. Ben was very nice enough to accept our comments as constructive criticism to make Friendster better once again.

Most of us were able to air our comments about Friendster, such as:

• Reliability
• Serving of Ads
• Unreadable User Profiles (due to customization)
• Targetting a Niche
• Making Applications for mobile phones / cellphones
• Making it more “local”, being fun and entertaining
• Games
• More user engagement with their social circle
• More SEO
• etc

What Ben assured us was that Friendster is working on new features and *probably* (it was long overdue) a redesign for Friendster. They also want to capture the “youth” market in South East Asia namely Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. With this they will be involved more on local events and promoting people to join Friendster, highlighting on provinces and places where internet is only starting. I also believe that they’ll do a Music feature which should be able to feature local bands in Asia. I was also able to ask a very sensitive question which was circulating around the web lately which was about “If Friendster is looking for a buyer and if they have found a new buyer for their company”. To which Ben wasn’t able to comment.

Is Friendster doing all these features and changes just so to increase the value of their shares to the buyer? Or is Friendster doing this really to get back on their feet and be one of the top social networking websites again? That I’m sure is still unclear. Whatever it is, I just hope it is for the best for Friendster.

Thank you very much Ben Dunn and Carlo Ople for the lunch treat.