Friendster Relaunches | Hacker News Reader

Friendster Relaunches

friendster.com

52 pointsnakajima33 comments

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"Join Friendster Today - Login with Facebook"

I'd like to have been in the room when that discussion took place.

And the look on their faces when Google+ launches the day before.

That may have been a good thing. Now they can ride the coat tails of the announcement and attention.

I personally doubt that I would have cared much for the announcement outside of any interesting context.

I'm at work and my company's network blocks Social Networking sites. Is this a joke? Does it really allow you to login in Facebook?

Yes. It is the most prominent method of joining that they display on the landing page. This is real.

Edit: Granted, they relaunched it as a social gaming site, so that signup method makes a bit more sense.

They probably get paid to implement Facebook connect on their million+ userbases though. So it may make more sense that way. Although to be fair allowing access to 750m (fb) users is a sensible enough argument.

How come they don't block friendster?

They do block Friendster. I could only read the comments, I couldn't follow the link...

> I'm at work and my company's network blocks Social Networking sites. Is this a joke?

For a second, I thought you were asking if your company's policy was a joke.

Spoiler alert: yes, but it's not funny.

MySpace has the same thing.

And so it does. I haven't had reason to look at MySpace for a goodly while until now.

That was a smart move. Their product is different and does not compete with Facebook.

That was a smart move. Their product is different and does not compete with Facebook

Sadly implemented dumbly; why on earth would I give them offline access to my Facebook account? Or, rather, I understand why, but don't understand why they won't let users try the service first, and then show them what they're missing out on by not granting offline access. Bizarre.

It also requires access to share on your Facebook wall without notifying you, which it seems to do after each game you try out on the website. Removing specific permissions from an application on Facebook is a much harder task than it seems to be. Also, if it requests so much information from Facebook, why does it still require me to type in my birthday and upload a picture of myself?

If they don't have a button that says "share" that you click before it posts that's a TOS violation and will likely be changed quickly if the FB compliance team is paying attention.

Fact of the matter is that install rates often don't change much when you ask for additional permissions. Most users don't care. There's often no compelling reason to build out complicated permissions flows when the standard "ask for it all up front" works just fine.

Have a source for that information? Facebook's own API documentation page says: "There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of permissions your site requests and the number of users that will allow those permissions. The greater the number of permissions you ask for, the lower the number of users that will grant them; so we recommend that you only request the permissions you absolutely need for your site."

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/#login

They were acquired in 2009 by MOL[1], an online points and payments system. MOL already has gaming infrastructure and points mechanisms built out (as well as a Friendster-branded internet cafe and licensable cafe management software[2]) - this looks like a push to gain traction for game-related payments in the US market, already popular in much of Asia. If they can start to eat away at Zynga's share, it makes a world of sense.

[1] http://global.mol.com/global/portal/en/Default.aspx [2]http://www.molglobal.net/?page_id=1325

Myspace is sold and friendster relaunches? We're not in a bubble, we're in a circle!

Look, kids! Big Ben! Parliament!

I remember back in the day, when friendster was first starting up. Some users like to have what you could refer to as 'gag' accounts, named things like "Root of All Evil". The people of friendster really didn't like that, and tried to squash all those accounts. I think it kind of streisanded them a little bit all those years ago.

for anyone curious: 'streisanded' refers to the streisand effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

I wonder if they'd do better to totally rebrand the site and shrug off the stink of "abandoned social networking website".

Is there a benefit to using the Friendster brand? Isn't it universally known as could-have-been social network? Why not just use whatever their resources are to start something fresh?

Simple name recognition is enough to get a lot of people to trust your site. People are a lot more willing to "log in with facebook" on frindster.com than they are on "Hi5.com".

Why not just promote the new Friendster as a place to play games and soft pedal the whole social networking past?

Would the site be more successful if they'd chosen a different domain name?

If they had chosen a new domain name they'd have nothing to separate them for the failing Hi5.com, which went from attempting to be a social network to doing the exact same thing this new Friendster is doing (logging in by Facebook and playing games).

"living the game" - angle does immediately speak alot to me as something that is not FB and not G+ etc. Gamers like their other world/networks to exist on.

Social game platform with multiple profiles? Friendster? It's already a bizarre morning.

I like that you can swap avatars based on mood. Reminds me of the good ol' days of LiveJournal.

Does this mean soon I can start ordering groceries online and have them delivered?

So, they lost the social graph game and now focus on the popular social game market. It's what zynga failed to do until now. There's huge audience and the monetization is guaranteed if they enroll virtual currency. if they can prove they can gain traction and provide a platform that is easy to convert to, I'm game.

Wait, but Facebook credits are virtual currency that are leveraged by Zynga.

Without a "farmville" styled killer app, Friendster isn't going very far.

They should have launched with a big social game player (obviously not zynga, who has an agreement with Facebook). However there are thousands of independent developers, and remember there were many killer apps before zynga came along.

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