Riding on the momentum of being crowned ‘king of social networks in Asia’ (comScore survey, April 2008), Friendster has been aggressively building and offering localization services for its multi-lingual base in a bid to strengthen its first mover advantage in the densely populated region, and rightly so.

Friendster attracts 36 million monthly unique visitors from Asia out of the overall 40 million globally. Their website now supports 8 Asian languages; Bahasa Indonesia, traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Vietnamese and the latest addition, Thai language in beta mode.

Upstart Facebook might have a bigger piece of the social networking pie globally, but brand marketers and application developers would want to seriously consider Friendster as a platform to effectively reach Asian consumers, instead of vying for the crumbs of Facebook’s pie.

Friendster has recently enhanced its services with a language customizable mobile platform and soon to be launched sms activity alert service, and appears determined to maintain its lead in a region where cellphones still far outnumber the number of PCs.

Friendster’s biggest audience is currently from the Southeast Asian countries of Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. In March this year, Friendster recorded 39 million unique visitors out of which 34%, or 13.2 million users were from the Philippines. 83% of Filipino internet users have a social network profile and current internet penetration rate is only at 15%, according to a recent study by media agency Universal McCann.

In Indonesia, where Friendster has over 9 million registered users and 5 million monthly unique visitors as of May 2008, the site is the #1 online social network and more than 5 times larger than the next top social network. Even a posting on Friendster made the news during a high profile political controversy in Malaysia, where the site has reportedly over 4 million monthly unique visitors and likely to draw even more traffic after the accidental publicity.