SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Friendster, Inc., has announced that it has deployed support for the Facebook Platform on http://www.friendster.com as part of the Friendster Developer Program. Tens of thousands of developers can now introduce the applications and features they've built on the Facebook Platform to Friendster's 80 million users around the world.

With support of developer applications on Facebook and the recent launch of OpenSocial support, companies and individual developers can now easily use the Facebook Platform, OpenSocial APIs or Friendster-developed APIs to deploy their applications, or "apps," on Friendster. With over 60 million of its 80 million users in Asia, the Friendster Developer Program now provides an easy way for developers to reach the largest group of internet users on a single social network in Asia.

Developer applications on the Friendster network enrich the user experience by providing hundreds of new and interesting features to use and share, with new features added on a weekly basis. These hundreds of new features include music, games, 3-D avatars, virtual worlds and experiences, group chat, videos, photos, sports, TV shows, entertainment, and news and information. For the Friendster user, applications provide another way to connect with friends by using and recommending new applications.

The Friendster Developer Program allows Friendster to introduce a large number of new, innovative features to its user base that were created externally by developers. With this, Friendster has become a platform for third-party developers to extend their reach and distribution.

"Friendster's support of both the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms is a big win for business and individual developers, as well as for Friendster users," said David Jones, vice president of global marketing for Friendster. "For the developers that have invested resources in developing and launching a Facebook app, Friendster has now made it very easy for them to 'port' these applications to Friendster, enabling them to tap into Friendster's 80 million users. For Web 2.0 companies that have developed apps using Facebook and OpenSocial APIs, they now have the flexibility to choose between approaches when launching applications on Friendster."

Friendster is an appealing destination for the developer community to launch existing or new applications, as Friendster's large user base does not significantly overlap with those of other social networks. For example, Friendster has only 22 percent overlap with Facebook,* therefore 78 percent of Friendster's 57 million monthly unique visitors -- or 45 million monthly unique visitors -- are incremental for Facebook developers. Additionally, developers have the freedom to monetize their applications using any monetization model on Friendster. Ads are allowed anywhere in an application, including the user profile page, providing the potential for a dramatic increase in page views and corresponding ad revenues. Friendster has also built in full viral support for developers, so users can quickly and easily share applications with friends on Friendster.

Developers can easily port their Facebook applications to Friendster within hours or a few days. Developers can go to http://www.friendster.com/developer for more information, download and include the Facebook API library in their code and get an API key using our self-service web form. Most applications are easy to port to Friendster, with the easiest being those that use the API methods, FBML tags, FQL queries or FBJS deployed as part of this major release. Additional details and documentation can be found at http://www.friendster.com/developer.

OpenSocial and Facebook Platform support are two major enhancements to the already successful Friendster Developer Program, launched in late 2007. Friendster was only the second major social network to launch a robust developer platform which, to date, has been successful for users and developers alike. Since its launch, over 12 million unique users have added applications, and about half a million applications are being added by users to their profile pages each day. There are currently thousands of developers registered for the Friendster Developer Program, roughly 2,000 members of the Friendster Developer Platform Group on Friendster, over 600 applications already deployed on Friendster, and thousands more currently under development by third-party developers.

Friendster is using the publicly available Facebook Open Platform release under the standard licenses. Facebook is aware of this implementation.