Look, a new Friendster

MANILA, Philippines - Friendster, Inc., a top global web site based on traffic, recently announced a new brand and web site packed with new features representing a significant milestone in the company’s history and further signifying the company’s evolution to focus on the Asian youth market. The notable changes include a new fun-centric brand, and a redesigned web site with a focus in local relevance, enhancing the overall user experience. The new direction and focus reflect Friendster’s dominant position among the youth audience in Asia.

“Our new brand is just one of the ways we are communicating the evolution of our business as well as our commitment to our users — they’ve given us great feedback and we’ve listened,” said Richard Kimber, chief executive officer at Friendster.

New Brand

At the center of Friendster’s new identity is an energetic logo symbolizing fun, personalization and individuality among youth. It represents the brand’s personality — fun, creative, friendly and personal. The new branding will also include a new tagline: “Connecting Smiles.” This tagline is Friendster’s unique brand promise and portrays what drives Friendster as a company and what the brand means to its users — simply put, it represents the youth enjoying themselves with their friends.

Building on Friendster´s position as a leading social network, the redesigned site is a clean, simple approach to sharing, communication and self-expression. The new design also places emphasis on those features that are favored by the Friendster community — like shout-outs, profile personalization, photo sharing, games, finding friends, and messaging.

The new site is designed to be colorful, fun and easy to use. In addition to the home and profile page, many of the popular pages have been redesigned to simplify the site experience. The primary features on these pages have been optimized for usability, putting all the features Friendster users love right at their fingertips.

New Product Launches

• The Friendster Wallet is a new micro-payments platform that allows users to purchase products and services on Friendster. The Friendster Wallet enables users to store account balances and supports a variety of payment methods including pre-paid cards, mobile payments, online payments and credit card payments.

• The Friendster Gift Shop enables the Friendster community to send virtual gifts to one another, quickly and conveniently. Friendster Gifts are used to send personal gestures of kindness, celebrate significant accomplishments, and recognize friends and family on special days, like birthdays, or just for fun.

• Friendster Games is an online games destination, which will offer Friendster users a wide variety of fun, entertaining games and applications to play online with their friends. Game developers will be able to incorporate The Friendster Wallet into their games, allowing them to participate in the Friendster micro-payments ecosystem.

“We look forward to delivering a great user experience and continued product innovation surrounding our new brand and web site. We have a lot coming in the weeks ahead — this is only the beginning,” said Kimber.