“Write a testi please?”
Before Facebook existed, Friendster was the go-to social network site for many youths in Singapore.
Founded in 2002, the site predated a good number of social networking platforms like MySpace and Facebook.
At its peak, it was the number 1 social platform in Asia, with more than 45 million monthly unique visitors from the region alone. The company even declined a US$30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003.
With a simple, customisable profile page, users could spend hours changing their page layouts to reflect their personalities – shoutout to those of us who learnt basic HTML just to make our profiles look snazzier!
Users would also often prod one another to write endorsements for each other on Friendster – known as testimonials.
Much like a public handshake, these testimonials were often reciprocal, giving their individual circles a peek into personal relationships. A budding romance? A political standoff? Read between the lines.
In 2008, Friendster announced that it had more unique visitors in Singapore than any other social network website in each and every age group, with more than 1.6 million registered users in the country at the time.
However, Facebook slowly crept up on the competition with superior networking opportunities, resulting in Friendster losing users to the platform over time.
In June 2011, Friendster rebranded itself as a social gaming site, and the platform eventually shut down four years later in June 2015.
