Friendster vs Facebook

It was in the late 2002 when Friendster became an official social networking site on the interent. Thus, during it’s partial introduction a lot of people around the globe signed up to their site and discover the wonders and advantages of a social networking site. As you may know, it was then Friendster the first social networking site ever. It was owned and licensed to Richer B. Kimber, the executive officer of Friendster located in Mountain View, California.

Focused on helping people meet new friends, stay in touch with old ones and sharing online content and media is one of the major prospect or somehow the vision of their system but eventually it maybe used for dating and discovering new events, bands, hobbies, and more. Users can share content including videos, photos, messages and comments with friends via their profile and their network.

For over 7 years of existence, they’ve added a lot of features unto the users dashboard like embedded video and audio clips, improved scalability, wide range of applications, new and improved CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and a whole lot more. With regards to Friendsters’ site wide traffic, 90% of it, is coming from Asia and the 10% coming from the different parts of the world. I really don’t know why Americans didn’t like it, based on traffic statistics.

Now with regards to Facebook, it was launched on the early 2004 under for use exclusively at Harvard University. It was created and built by Mark Zuckerberg inorder for him to get rid of this girl he was blogging about few years ago.

Zuckerberg wrote at 8:13pm:

— [...] I need to think of something to make to take my mind off her. I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough, now I just need an idea.”

Continuing at 9:48pm: — “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

11:09 pm:

— ” “Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals . . .), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.”

The above script signifies Marks’ thinking of the creation of The Facebook (old name) for his own good. Now let’s move on with Facebooks’ not so elegant customisations.

The media often compares Facebook to MySpace and Friendster, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. Friendster and MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.

Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact. They include the Wall, a space on every user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see,Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual “poke” to each other (a notification that tells a user that they have been poked), Photos, where users can upload albums and photos, and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. A user’s Wall is visible to anyone who is able to see that user’s profile, which depends on their privacy settings. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.

Over time, Facebook has added several new features to its website. On September 6, 2006, a News Feed was announced, which appears on every user’s homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays related to the user’s friends. Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, while others were concerned it made it too easy for other people to track down individual activities (such as changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users). In response to this dissatisfaction, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site’s failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent friends from seeing updates about different types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos. Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. In the past, all users were limited to 60 photos per album. However, some users report that they are able to create albums with a new limit of 200 photos. It remains unclear why some members have a 200-photo limit while others do not. Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user’s friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos applications is the ability to “tag”, or label users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user’s friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.

Facebook Notes was introduced on August 22, 2006, a blogging feature that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. During the week of April 7, 2008, Facebook released a Comet-based instant messaging application called “Chat” to several networks, which allows users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-based instant messengers.

Facebook launched Gifts on February 8, 2007, which allows users to send virtual gifts to their friends that appear on the recipient’s profile. Gifts cost $1.00 each to purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to each gift. On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads. Marketplace has been compared to Craigslist by CNET, which points out that the major difference between the two is that listings posted by a user on Marketplace are only seen by users that are in the same network as that user, whereas listings posted on Craigslist can be seen by anyone.

So mostly, Facebook is an all in one social networking site which is most preferrable by most people. And as expected, Americans love it and so they do have a million users of facebook and a few coming from Asia and different parts of the world.  Well in my own opinion I like most with Facebooks service, although I cannot edit my profile look but as far as I am concerned Facebooks reliability and at most scalability like instant messaging ang comment like statuses which I am currently enjoying, give me the best of being a member of a social networking.