• The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 11:01 AM

The talk in the Web industry these days is about Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and the virtual worlds catering to kids. Many may be wondering what happened to Friendster, the original Web 2.0 social network? It just moved to Asia (sort of). Incidentally, business is good, too-very good.

Friendster is still live in the U.S., but nobody over here is taking much notice (including the company), because some 70% of the social network's traffic now comes from Southeast Asia. It's the most popular Web site in the Philippines and the second most popular site in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Friendster's growth has been astonishing. Since 2003, when the company started to lose U.S. users to MySpace, its registered user base has grown more than 10 times. It now has 20 times the page views over the same period.

Forget Facebook, Friendster has firmly established itself as the second-most popular social network worldwide. It has a total 41 million Internet users in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia alone, according to Internet World Stats. But there are problems here. The privately held company of just 35 employees has been going through management turmoil, having gone through four CEOs since 2004. It's also suffered massive slowdowns throughout the years, a problem only just fixed last year. Perhaps its biggest problem, though, is its identity crisis: is Friendster an Asian company or an American one? The company is still based in San Francisco, but should it be?

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »