Friendster: Now with Widget Platform

Questions?email Derek		Questions?email Avatar

Friendster: Now with Widget Platform

by Avatar	Stumble this!	October 26th 2007

Friendster recently announced a platform to compete with myspace and hi5. i don´t include facebook in this because it is not competing against it in any way and people should not even try to compare them.

Friendster is the original Social network that came to be when Jonathan Abrams simply decided to make a open version of Match.com. most people don´t know this but the proto basis of social networks is Friendster, and in turn friendster was based on Match.com that were the result of a convergence of dating site adquisition and the merge of them. Myspace creators then just did another evolutionary step from there by mixing Friendster with Blogger to create Myspace and the rest is pretty much history.

Then there is Hi5 that simply diverts directly from Friendster while looking more at the original angle of Dating sites and simply improved upon Firendster while they remained static.

Back to present and we got a Friendster that is still acting reactively and not in a proactive way but in a way that seems quite streamlined and without any sense of risk betting. i applaud their choice of calling their apps widgets because that is what they are. Widgets are widgets even in modular form as Live Spaces shows and remains the most glaring example of modular widgets outside of Start pages, so i don´t see anything wrong with them calling them that, i don´t think it mess with nomenclature either.

This new Widget platform will offer of course a widget directory and i am guessing that it may even allow widgets to break loose in some terms out of it.

Do Widget and App platform have become a commodity?, yes,of course that they have. but nothing less could be expected, there cannot be further evolutiong without reaching a critical mass.

Friendster Developer

Other good views on this news can be found in this order:

Friendster Announces Developer Platform; Can You Say “Commodity”? (techcrunch)

Friendster Announces Developer Platform (AllFacebook)

Friendster Joins the Platform Party; Widget Directory Launching Nov. 30th (mashable)