| Website | friendster.com |
| Category | Software |
| help@friendster.com | |
| Employees | 465 |
| Founded | 1/01 |
| Total | $25.4M |
| Series A, 12/02 Battery Ventures | $2.4M |
| Series B, 10/03 Battery Ventures Benchmark Capital Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers | $13M |
| Series C, 8/06 Benchmark Capital DAG Ventures Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers | $10M |
Founded in 2002, Friendster is one of the web’s older social networking services. Adults, 18 and up can join and connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. The site currently has over 50 million users.
It’s rumored that Google offered $30M to buy Friendster in 2003 (when the company looked very promising), but was turned down. Things have somewhat changed since then though. Friendster failed to become what MySpace and Facebook are today largely because of its inability to scale with the growing demand. Since 2004, Friendster has gone through five different CEOs.
Friendster was the 2007 recipient of the Webware 100 Award for best community site. The company has also been granted a number of social networking focused patents.
Friendster’s competitors include Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Piczo, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Visible Path and others.
| Website | friendster.com |
| Launch Date | 2002 |
| Tags | social-network, friends, network, social-networking |
