Facebook and Friendster in Indonesia

copied from Thomas Arie's statement on planet.seveners.com

I feel that more people added me as their Facebook contact list these days. And, many of them already added me to other social network site: Friendster. I joined both sites, but I almost never use Friendster in the last few months. I found that Friendster is too boring. I know, it might because I only use some of its feature.

When I visited Friendster, I only checked the friend requests, approve (or simply ignore them). Other than that? Almost nothing.

Few days ago, I looked up Friendster’s Alexa statistics. The traffic goes down — compared to its competitor: Facebook. When I checked both service using Google Trend, I got the similar result.

According to Friendster’s press release in April 2008, Friendster has more than 8 million registered users and 4 million monthly unique visitors to Friendster.com as of February 2008. The press release also said that:

Friendster is the most popular online social network in Indonesia with over 3.9 million weekly unique users, according to analysis of Alexa data as of April 1, 2008. “This makes Friendster more than five times larger than Facebook which has no more than 700,000 unique users each week, and this makes Friendster seven times larger than MySpace which has no more than 530,000 in Indonesia,” said David Jones, vice president of global marketing at Friendster. “As the second largest Web site in Indonesia (second only to Yahoo!) and the No. 1 social network in Indonesia, launching support for Indonesian will help Friendster maintain and extend its leadership position in the country as well as with Indonesians around the world.

On the other hand, Facebook becomes more popular now. According to Facebook demographic statistics, there are already more than 1 million registered users from Indonesia as of February 2009. Let’s see what will happen in the next few months. Should be interesting.