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Friendster, number one Social Network in Asia, now available in Malay

By Andrew Redfern @ 19th June 2008 9:23 am

Friendster, today announced that Friendster.com is available in Malay, allowing Friendster users and visitors a greater choice of languages with which to navigate the site, enter content and use Friendster’s complete set of social networking features.

The 15 million Internet users in Malaysia and Malaysians around the world can now easily join and use Friendster, the pioneer of social networking that is now the 7th largest website globally of any kind based on traffic and the #1 social network in Asia.

Friendster

Friendster now fully supports nine languages — English, Malay, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. These languages represent over 70 percent of the world’s Internet users, or almost a billion Internet users in total.

In Malaysia, Friendster has over 4 million monthly unique visitors to Friendster.com as of April 2008. Since there are over 15 million Internet users in Malaysia,(2) over 27 percent of Malaysia visited Friendster in April.

A typical user spends 30 minutes a day on Friendster and visits Friendster several times a week, communicating with friends and
sharing/consuming content through a suite of features.

Friendster is the most popular online social network in Malaysia according to a recent analysis of industry data.(3) “With over 4 million active users every week, Friendster is at least four times larger than Facebook or MySpace in Malaysia,” said David Jones, vice president of global marketing at Friendster.

“As the second largest Web site in Malaysia (second only to Yahoo!) and the #1 social network in Malaysia, launching support for Malay will help Friendster maintain and extend its leadership position in the country as well as with Malaysians around the world.”

Malay as a language choice on Friendster has been available in beta since May 22, 2008. In only a few weeks, 100,000 users per day are now using Friendster in Malay, and they are currently viewing pages on Friendster in Malay at the rate of over 40 million pages per month. “We are pleased with the level of adoption during this initial, brief beta phase,” said Jones.

“Friendster has a large number of bilingual users who would like the choice to enter their content and use the site in either Englishor Malay, and countless users are looking forward to inviting their friends and family who speak Malay to join them on Friendster.”

Friendster has implemented multi-language support on a single domain — Friendster.com — to promote communication and interaction among users who speak different languages. Seventy-nine percent of active Friendster users have friends in more than one country, and 23 percent of friend connections are between users in different countries.

These cross-border percentages, believed to be the highest of all major social networks, require multi-language support to be implemented in a single global Web site. While other social networking sites create separate sites for different countries or languages, Friendster was the first global online social network to employ this single-site approach to allow and encourage multi-cultural exchange and communications — regardless of language — among users around the world and especially in Asia.

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