Friendster

Friendster is an Internet social network service. The Friendster site was founded in Mountain View, California by Jonathan Abrams in 2002 and is privately owned. Every user creates an online identity by filling out a questionnaire profile and uploading a user picture, and then defines a gallery of friends, and the service then integrates these galleries, allowing a user to search through a list of their friends, their friends' friends, and so on. The premise is that in this way, one can interact with and meet people who are always a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and not a random, unknown person (such as may be found on instant messaging or IRC). It is difficult to verify the number of members (or active members) of Friendster. Currently, the service's home page claims more than 19 million "profiles, photos, and blogs", and an info page states that there are "more than 20 million members". In the press, however, an often cited figure is approximately 2 million. If user ID numbers are assigned consecutively, there have been at least 21,351,560 (though it is unclear what proportion of unique ID numbers represent unique active users).

See also

• Medmania.com
• tribe.net
• Hi5.com
• Zorpia.com- A social networking site with free photo storage to share photos
• sms.ac - A possible internet scam site?
• Thefacebook - a social networking site similar to Friendster targeted at college students
• orkut
• MySpace
• yafro
• GoFISH
• Connexion (social network)
• FriendSPOT.net
• WireClub.com
• angpau
• my-mates.co.uk
• aSmallWorld
• memetika - social networking based on shared interests instead of shared friends