Friendster launches Chinese edition

Well... traditional Chinese, anyway.

I'm taking daily Chinese classes now at Tsinghua University, and one of my classmates emailed me and asked if I was on Friendster. No, I'm not... although I've certainly heard of it and my email inbox fills up quite nicely with Friendster sign-up requests.

Perhaps Friendster is much more popular in China than Facebook, which I waste way too much time on, or MySpace, which recently launched its Chinese edition. And to build on its growth here, Friendster has launched its website with a Chinese-language interface.

This is a strategic move for Friendster, as numbers have shown that it's far from dead in the Asia-Pacific region, where 35 million of its 50 million users are based--in fact, ComScore numbers have indicated that with global growth taken into account, Friendster is growing more quickly than MySpace. Traditional Chinese, the company noted, is used by 16 percent of Internet users.

Unlike MySpace, which operates a number of international verticals in different languages, Friendster's Chinese version will exist atop the same domain as its English-language site. This way, English-speaking users will be able to network with Chinese-speaking users and vice versa.

According to a release from the company, "While other social networking sites create separate sites for different countries and make it difficult or impossible to have international friend networks, Friendster is the first global online social network to employ this approach to allow and encourage multi-cultural exchange and communications among users around the world who are interested in doing so."

I'd be nice if people in China gave Facebook a try... or if Facebook started a Chinese-language version to encourage Chinese involvement. Nearly all of my friends on Facebook are people from home or other foreigners in China. Considering the large number of Chinese people I've met since I moved here, hardly any use Facebook. It seems to be a laowai kind of thing.

Perhaps I'll have to give Friendster a try one of these days... although with blogging, MSN Messenger, Facebook, the Drudge Report, and Google Reader, I don't think I need any more reasons to waste time.