Mediaboss Marketing

Its not yet Thursday, but Filipinos went on twitter yesterdayto remember what what was their to-gosocial networking site years ago: Friendster.

While Facebook is undoubtedly now the number one social networking site in the world with billions of users, theres no doubt that Filipinos were hooked to one social media site before everyone jumped ship to the one at Menlo Park.

Surge of Popularity in the Philippines

Friendster began its popularity with the masses in 2004 when it has been decreasing its activity in North America. Carmen Leilani De Jesus, amarketing consultant based in San Francisco, was thefirst to link to what was the sites surge of web traffic coming from many parts of Southeast Asia.

One year after, it managed to grab over five million active users, and figures from the Internet World Stats pegged the amount of Filipino Friendster users at 7.2 Million.It was the first mover in social networking in the country, and before that, nothing came close to it except for forums or message boards,our very own Abe Olandres mentioned to American broadcasting network PBS back in 2007.Friendster also went on to be a centerpiece of local politics and see one of the first online social political campaigns, led by then-Senatorial candidate Chiz Escudero in the 2007 National Elections.

Friendster proved to be very popular that the company decided toset up an office in the country to manage its growing userbase, paving way for local Friendster events such as the Pinoy Friendster Day. Since then, millions of Pinoys who want to socialize went on to post updates, customize their profiles with GIF wallpapers, and send out testimonials to their friends with alternating letter cases, punctuation, and numbers replacing a few letters. We all learned to make our own little codes to format our testimonials in whatever color, font face, or style we want them to, and make our own custom profile layouts with sparkles, goth designs, or bizarre arrays of color combinations. One can never deny that this sitehas brought out the inner jejemon in us.

We got a few twitter users who were using the Friendster Memories 101 keyword, which is trending in the country yestedayby the way, reminiscing their own experiences with the site:

Facebook and Twitter, Decline, and Revamp

See the article here:
#Trending: Whats your Friendster story?