Friendster Gets Friendly With Facebook Applications

Last month at the Web 2.0 Expo, none of the major U.S. social networks had an expo booth. But one of the most talked about booths was Friendster and their sign that read "#1 in Asia". Apparently Friendster has over 60 million users in Asia. Tonight Friendster has announced that Facebook applications are now portable overview to the Friendster developer platform. In essence if you have a Facebook application, you can now expose it to 60 million more potential users in Asia.

Apparently there is only a 22% overlap in audiences between both social networks making the choice to port attractive. The Friendster application directory only has 600 applications so those who port quickly may see a nice bump versus the tens of thousands of Facebook applications currently available.

Adam Ostrow has a good review of the launch which includes his note about the challenge to developers to make them attractive to a different audience. Ostrow goes on to explain that Facebook developers should utilize the crowdsourced translation options on Facebook before they port apps over to Friendster.

Looks like we will see a developer showdown between Facebook’s fbOpen and that of Google supported OpenSocial. Somehow my guess the showdown will push developers to create applications that work on both platforms.