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Jakarta (ANTARA News/PRNewswire-AsiaNet) - Friendster, Inc. (http://www.friendster.com) today announced that Friendster.com is available in Indonesian, 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.

Friendster now fully supports seven languages -- English, Indonesian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. These languages represent over 67 percent of the world's Internet users, or over three quarters of a billion Internet users in total.

In Indonesia, Friendster has over 8 million registered users and 4 million monthly unique visitors to Friendster.com as of February 2008(1). Since there are 20 million Internet users in Indonesia(2), 20 percent of Indonesia visited Friendster in February, and over 40 percent of Indonesia has a Friendster account. 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 Indonesia with over 3.9 million weekly unique users, according to analysis of Alexa data as of April 1, 2008(3). "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.

Indonesian as a language choice on Friendster has been available in beta for about four weeks. In only four weeks, over 250,000 users per day are now using Friendster in Indonesian, and they are currently viewing pages on Friendster in Indonesian at the rate of 140 million pages per month. Several thousand new users in Indonesia are registering each day, and over four thousand people every day are registering with Indonesian set as their language. "We haven't marketed Indonesian much to our users, so we are pleased with this level of adoption during this initial brief beta phase," said Jones.

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. Additionally, Friendster users can enter content in any language throughout the site as they use Friendster's complete set of social networking features.

"Friendster has a large number of bilingual users who would like the choice to enter their content and use the site in either English or Indonesian, and countless users are looking forward to inviting their friends and family who speak Indonesian to join them on Friendster," said Jones.

Users can permanently or temporarily set their language of choice via links at the top right of every page of the Friendster.com Web site or via the "Settings" link.

Friendster Leads in Asia

Friendster is the No. 1 social network in Asia, with over 49 million registered users and 32 million monthly unique visitors from Asia(1). In Asia, Friendster is more than double the size of any other social network. While Friendster has 32 million monthly unique visitors in Asia, MySpace.com and MySpace.cn have only 15 million combined, Facebook has 14 million, CyWorld (Korea) has 14 million, Hi5 has 10 million, Orkut has 10 million, Xiaonei (China) has 5 million, 51.com (China) has 5 million, and Bebo has 4 million(1).

Friendster Advances Globally

Friendster is the eighth-largest Web site in the world and the third largest social network in the world in terms of traffic(1). In the last two months, Friendster moved from 12th place to eighth place in the world, passing Tencent (operator of QQ.com in China), Cyworld (a social network in Korea), NHN Corporation (operator of Naver, the top Korean Web portal), and Hi5 (a social network primarily used in Central/South America and non-Western Europe).

Friendster is growing faster than any other top social network in absolute terms and percentage terms over the last month and the last quarter(1). In February, for example, Friendster grew 9 percent or 3 million monthly unique visitors. In January, Friendster grew 15 percent, or 4.4 million monthly unique visitors. Over the last three months, Friendster has grown a total of 8.7 million monthly unique visitors, or 31 percent, more than any other top social network.

About Friendster

With more than 65 million members worldwide, Friendster is a leading global online social network. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them. Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, social groups, activities and interests. Friendster prides itself in delivering an easy-to-use, friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world. Friendster has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking, with more expected over the next several months. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and individual investors. For more information, visit: http://www.friendster.com.

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