Days before Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there was this friendly place called Friendster.
Remember Friendster? The social media website where you could share music, video, and photos with your actual friends long before Facebook spearheaded the idea? It was a wonderful time indeed, before fake news, toxicity, and other social issues became prevalent. It even predated YouTube by four years. The internet was as innocent as a toddler back then.
It was launched in Canada by Jonathan Abrahams, a compute programmer. The social media website turned out to be a success, competing with then-giants MySpace and Hi-5. It predated Facebook by two years. The name “Friendster” was derived from “Friends” and “Napster”. To people who have used and encountered its existence, it was basically an early form of torrenting, a peer-to-peer service.
In 2009 and early 2010s, Facebook has overcome both MySpace and Friendster as the dominating social media platform. Friendster peaked in 2008 where it had 115 million users in Asia. It had done nothing wrong, it just did not adapt to the emerging market fast enough, and Facebook’s marketing and features are much more advanced.
In 2011, Friendster has shifted as a social networking service to a social gaming site similar to how Facebook operated games like Farmville and Pet Society. It mostly targeted Asian gamers and its headquarters were moved from Canada to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. However this too is not successful and in 2015, the website shut down and in 2018, the company ceased to exist.
That is about to change, as in 2022 a new version of Friendster, now back to its social media roots, has emerged online under a new domain friendster.click. It appears that this website is new and bare bones. It has tabs for Blogs, Members, Groups, Forums, and a Sign-in page. It currently does not have an app but it is now open for registration. We are not yet sure if this is the successor of the original Friendster, or an individual or company is just using the name.
We tried opening the website. And it brings back memories. It loads slow as hell, reminiscent of dial-up and early postpaid internet back in the early 2000s and the UI just feels like a modernized version of a typical blog back then.
We recommend extreme caution when creating an account as the website is not secure and the top-level domain (TLD) is not a .com link, and its rating on Scam Detector is a measly 58.3%. In addition, the website was created just recently, November 18th, according to its report.
Carefully read its privacy policy here.
Source: Unbox.ph