So Friendster (so 2003, no?) has received a $10 million lifeline from investors, allowing them to try to re-establish themselves on the social networking scene. This is going to be pretty hard, as there’s younger and cooler competition on the scene these days. They need to go from the wallflower they are today, back to being froody and, more to the point, relevant to peoples’ lives.
Their master plan, it seems, is to abandon its roots and go older – targeting the 20 and 30 somethings. This smacks of desperation somewhat – in social networking terms, focusing on the ugly people, coz the attractive ones won’t shag you.
What they should be doing, as I’ve been suggesting for over 2 years now, is integrating mobile into their core proposition. Why is The Valley (with some admitted exceptions) so desktop-centric, still? Wake up, it’s 2006!
I had thought that Friendster had got this priciple back in November 2004, when they announced their mobile experiment in The Philippines – even though I agued that there were flaws in the strategy and execution. But mobile seemed to be on their radar and that would surely lead to further developments.
Fast forward to today and The Philippines experiment is still the only thing mobile about Friendster – and wishfully still labeled “new”. At the same time, there’s still no really great¬† social networking site that successfully combines the best of web and mobile, with any kind of scale (correct me if I’m wrong) and the opportunity is still wide open. And even in the US, teens are clearly embarking on the obsessionist love affair with their mobiles that we’ve had in Europe for so much longer.
So, if Friendster wants a make over and to seek relevance to its target market, don’t go old, go mobile. Or the next announcement in six months might be a desperate new strategy of trying to appeal to Octogenarians – after all, there’s not much competition there!
[tags] friendster, mobile, social networking [/tags]
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