NEWS: Friendster, Yahoo! SEA users to gain from tie-up

MOUNTAIN VIEW (California): Friendster Inc, a pioneer social networking website, has formed a multi-year strategic partnership with Yahoo! South-East Asia — one of the most trafficked Internet destinations in Asia.

The partnership is designed to benefit their users via the introduction of integrated product features and promotional initiatives across both their web properties.

It will also foster new user registrations and increase user activity for both companies.

Yahoo! — the world’s largest global online network of integrated services — is the leading provider of web mail, instant messaging and other content and services throughout South-East Asia. It has 500 million users worldwide.

Friendster’s social network in South-East Asia has more than 90 million registered users while 90% percent of its daily traffic comes from that region today.

The strategic relationship comprises four major components — a new application built by Friendster that is available, or coming soon, on the new Yahoo! homepages in the region.

There are the graphical and text-based promotional placements for Yahoo! products and services on the Friendster site.

Then, there is the upcoming launch of enhanced search results for Friendster user-profiles and Friendster fan-profiles within Yahoo! Search.

And finally, Friendster users will soon be able to link their account to their Yahoo! account on an opt-in basis to share their Friendster network activity updates with friends and others via Yahoo! properties.

Making improvements

The launch of Friendster’s enhanced Yahoo! search results for Friendster member profiles and fan profiles, also used by celebrities, artistes and organisations, in early 2010 will make Friendster results on Yahoo! Search more visible, useful, and engaging.

Friendster said the new search results will include a custom layout of Friendster pages in Yahoo! search results that will include convenient links, photos, and key information from the underlying profile pages.

This, it said, will help Yahoo! and Friendster users more easily discover and connect with the things that are important to them.

Of course, privacy settings that have already been set and are controllable by each Friendster user for their profile page will apply to the information shared in the enhanced Yahoo! search results.

Being able to link Friendster and Yahoo! accounts means Friendster users will have the ability to publish Friendster network activity (from a user’s “Stream” on the site) to Yahoo! Messenger and other Yahoo! properties (that leverage the Yahoo! Updates API and initiative).

This will allow Friendster users to share their publicly-available activities on Friendster — such as new Shoutouts, new photos, new friends, new messages, etc — to Yahoo! and their friends in Yahoo! Messenger, for example.

Symbiotic

“Our new relationship, integration and cross-promotional efforts with Yahoo! will help build stronger links between two large and leading web properties in Asia for the benefit of both user bases,” said David Jones, vice-president of global product at Friendster.

Friendster was acquired in December last year by MOL Global Pte Ltd, an affiliate of leading online payment solutions provider MOL AccessPortal Bhd, a Malaysian company.

Friendster and MOL have combined to form Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network; pairing MOL’s offline retail channel partners and payment platform with Friendster’s large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia. — Bernama