Big Plan for Friendster in the Asia Pacific Region

Forget MySpace and Facebook. In the Asia Pacific region Friendster is the king of social networking sites. Numero uno.

Last Tuesday, Friendster appointed a new CEO - Richard Kimber, the former regional managing director of South Asia at Google.

Along with Kimber, Friendster will get an injection of $20 million in funding from IDG Ventures which, according to the social networking site, will be used to push Friendster's presence in the Asia Pacific region.

In retrospect, for those short on memory, Friendster was once the leading social network everywhere but it slipped up along the way and allowed MySpace, Facebook and some others to steal its thunder.

Dumped mainly by U.S. audience, Friendster had quietly remain active in the Asian region and, according to new chief Kimber, it is growing strongly in Asia-Pacific. So far, Friendster has built up a 75 million user base. That's not bad for a social network site ignored in the West but loved by many in the East.

And Now Yahoo Buy MyBlogLog

Social networking was the main talking point last year with the acquisitions of MySpace by Rupert Murdoch and YouTube by Google. It looks like it's not going to end there.

Yahoo continues the acquisition story with the announcement on Jan 8 that it has bought the popular community site MyBlogLog. Yahoo's latest purchase followed a strings of acquisitions of other social networking sites that includes Del.icio.us, Flickr and Upcoming.

MyBlogLog, founded in 2005, enables registered users to form communities and provide them with online tools to create a profile and associate it with their blogs.

"If blogging was originally about building a community and having a conversation with people in that community, then MyBlogLog provides the missing link that makes those connections more real," Chad Dickerson, senior director of Yahoo Developer Network, said in a company blog announcing the deal.

> The jig is up - MyBlogLog joins Yahoo!