Friendster, the 2002 originator of today's social networking phenomenon, announced Thursday morning that 100 percent of its assets will be acquired by MOL Global, an affiliate of the online payment company MOL AccessPortal Berhad located in Kuala Lumpur.
The first social network to launch, and the first to roll out in Asia, Friendster still enjoys popularity there, thanks to 75 million registered users there who constitute over 90 percent of the site's overall membership. In addition to focusing the company further on the Asian and especially South Asian market, MOL Global plans to integrate its payment systems into Friendster, making enabling commerce and especially micro-transactions through the service. MOL also plans to add its network for selling games, gifts, music, video and physical items.
The deal, which will be completed by the end of the year, came about after MOL Global built two services for the network — The Friendster Wallet and The Friendster Gift Shop — that let users buy virtual gifts for friends starting in October. The parties did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but the Financial Times pegs it at around $100 million.
On one hand, Friendster investors are lucky the service is popular enough with Asian teenagers for the sale to happen at all, considering users elsewhere moved on to MySpace, then Facebook and Twitter. On the other, as All Things Digital points out, if then-white-hot Friendster had sold to Google in 2003 for $30 million in Google stock, that deal would have been worth $1 billion today — ten times what MOL Global paid.
For users of social networks, Friendster's saga offers a cautionary tale. At a time when MySpace is gobbling up social media networks like imeem and iLike, and Apple is acquiring Lala, Friendster's metamorphosis into an Asia-focused network comes as another reminder that as we build more of our lives onto social networks, we do so on constantly-shifting ground.
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