Search results, including sponsored links and algorithmic search results, are generated in response to a query, and are marked based on frequency of clicks on the search results by members of social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation from the member who submitted the query. The markers are visual tags and comprise either a text string or an image.

Interestingly, the patent was originally filed by Friendster. Last year, Facebook bought Friendster’s patents and patent applications.

[BNET]

The acquisition price was not disclosed, but it is rumored to have sold for about $100 million. The company raised about $45 million in funding since they started. Not a bad return for investors. Friendster launched in 2001. Below is the full press release.

MOL Global to Acquire Friendster

MOL Retail and Payment Channels and Leading Online Social Network Combine to Form Massive Content Distribution and E-commerce Platform in Asia for Over 100 Million Users

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ — MOL Global Pte. Ltd. (“MOL Global”), an affiliate of leading online payment solutions provider MOL AccessPortal Berhad (“MOL”), and Friendster, Inc. (“Friendster”), the operator of a top global web site based on traffic and a leading social network in Asia, announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which MOL Global will acquire 100% of Friendster. The principal shareholder of MOL is Tan Sri Vincent Tan, the Chairman and CEO of Berjaya Corporation Berhad, a leading, diversified Malaysian conglomerate that has annual revenues in excess of US$1.8 billion. Following the acquisition, the operations of MOL and Friendster will be combined to create Asia’s largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network, pairing MOL’s offline retail channel partners and payment platform with Friendster’s large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia.

“The merger with Friendster will continue to transform the social networking industry, combining a highly intuitive and successful social media site and online marketing channel with an integrated payment platform and content network which includes games, goods, gifts, music and video. We are creating a unique company that will be well positioned to provide content to a huge, regional user base, here in Southeast Asia,” said Ganesh Kumar Bangah, president and chief executive officer of MOL.

MOL uses the leverage of a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels across 75 countries worldwide to collect payments for content and services. Its core markets are Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and India. MOL has relationships with over 70 online game publishers that have a suite of over 200 online game titles. It also has partnerships with music, movie and video content owners and distributors across the region.

“Friendster and MOL are both industry pioneers and are close partners. This combination is a natural progression of our relationship and will be an industry-changing event,” said Richard Kimber, chief executive officer at Friendster. “The new combined entity gives Friendster the kind of financial backing, retail distribution, and e-commerce infrastructure that will enable us to accelerate our strategy and create a locally relevant, fun experience for our users in Asia, both on and offline.”

In 2003, Friendster pioneered social networking, and today is a leading web site in Asia, with over 75 million registered users and over 90 percent of daily traffic coming from the region. Asian youths have embraced Friendster and use it as their primary means of connecting to and keeping in touch with friends, self-expression, sharing content and news with friends, and as a source of entertainment. Friendster users also enjoy local music, gifting, photo sharing, online games, and using Friendster on their mobile devices. All of these are incorporated in Friendster’s product suite and will be further developed over time with MOL, specifically with Asian youths in mind.

Friendster and MOL entered a global partnership in October of this year where MOL was appointed to provide an integrated payments platform, as a foundation for The Friendster Wallet and The Friendster Gift Shop, for Friendster’s users. The new combined entity will now build upon that initial set of products to deliver a content distribution network and e-commerce platform, enabling a wide array of content to be distributed to Friendster’s community and monetize via micro-transactions using MOL’s payment platform. MOL will use the leverage of its physical distribution networks to localize and extend the online reach of social networking in Southeast Asia to the physical world through Tan Sri Vincent Tan’s substantial assets across Malaysia and the region, including retail franchises in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia such as Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Borders, Krispy Kreme, Wendy’s and Papa John’s Pizza, just to name a few.

Friendster recently launched a new brand and web site packed with new features representing a significant milestone in the company’s history and further signifying the company’s evolution to focus on the Asian youth market. The notable changes include a new fun-centric brand, and a redesigned web site with a focus on local relevance, fun and simplicity.

The combined entity will maintain offices in various locations, around the world, including Mountain View, CA (USA), the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. Ganesh Kumar Bangah will become the Group Chief Executive Officer of the combined entity while Richard Kimber will become the Non-Executive Chairman.

About MOL

MOL is a MSC Malaysia Status Company that operates and develops payment systems. MOL handles over 60,000,000 payment transactions a year with an annual payment volume of over US$200 million. It leverages on a network of over 500,000 physical and virtual payment channels across more than 75 countries and linked to 65 banks in 15 countries worldwide to operate its key payment products, namely MOLePoints, an online micropayment system for content and services; MOLeTopUp, an electronic prepaid distribution infrastructure; MOL Freedom, a multi-application prepaid payment card; GamesHive, an online game payment aggregator; MOL Wings, a payment aggregator for wired and wireless internet service providers; MOL Zone, a multi-application mobile payment service; and MOL SafePay, an escrow-based payment system for micro-merchants.

MOL was recognized as one of Asia Pacific’s fastest growing technology companies in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific Awards in 2005 and 2006 and has won a Merit Award for the Best of E-Commerce Applications in the MSC Asia Pacific ICT Awards.

About Friendster

With more than 115 million members worldwide, Friendster is a leading global online social network. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them. Friendster is one of the best sites that allow people to meaningfully participate with others in exciting and fun ways. Friendster prides itself in delivering an easy-to-use, friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world via www.friendster.com or m.friendster.com from any Internet-ready mobile device. Friendster has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking, with more expected over the next several months. For more information, visit: www.friendster.com.

Regardless Friendster still has millions of users and is a top 200 website. This is why the company is attempting to sell themselves for “more than $100 million” according to Reuters. Friendster CEO Richard Kimber even mentioned that the company is currently negotiating with a shortlist of buyers.

Some of the early potential suitors that considered buying Friendster already since the company put themselves on sale this past summer include Tencent, Facebook, Oak Pacific, and Softbank. The company may even sell off as early as the end of the month.

Friendster is the first social network to allow money transfer via a partner platform.  This service may be useful for Friendster’s 13 million active Phillippines members.  Friendster has about 95 million users worldwide.  But I only login to Friendster to delete spam messages that show up in my inbox via the social network.

In order to initiate the serive, login to Friendster and associate friends with their GCASH mobile phone numbers.  A GCASH account must be owned by both users involved in the transaction.  Transaction fees cost about P2.50.

“By enabling online money transfer, we’ve made it significantly easier for users in the Philippines and their family and friends all over the world to securely send money easily, affordably and quickly,” stated David Jones, VP of Global Marketing at Friendster. “With over 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines on Friendster and many Filipinos around the world, including overseas foreign workers, also on Friendster, millions can now transfer money with ease directly from their preferred social network.”

[via TMCNet]

In terms of growing teams and expanding, Friendster is doing so on a global scale.  The CEO of Friendster, Richard Kimber and newly added hires for the social network’s marketing, sales, and business development teams are all based in Sydney.  The Singapore office will bring on additional sales, marketing, and business development teams.  Friendster opened up a new office in Mountain View, California where the executive staff and employees in all other departments will run their operations.  Later this year, the office in Manila, Phillipines will be expanding.

In Singapore, Friendster receives 1 million monthly unique visitors so Pixel Media will serve as their advertising broker in that region.  Pixel will also broker ads for Friendster’s traffic in Malaysia which comes out to be 3.6 million monthly unique visitors.

“The expansion of our team, offices and sales partnerships in Asia not only sets 2009 up to be an exciting year, but helps us pursue the necessary monetization opportunities available to Friendster in our core Asian markets,” stated Kimber. “As we move deeper into 2009, we will continue to build upon our direct sales, product, engineering, operations, marketing and finance teams to execute on our strategy and unwavering focus on Asia Pacific.”

Kimber joined Friendster in August 2008.  Before this position, he was Google’s Managing Director of Sales and Operations for South East Asia.  He was managing 1,000 people around the time he departed.  Friendster has about $45 million in funding since they started in 2002.  Investors include Battery Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Kleiner Perkins, DAG Ventures, and IDG Ventures.

With this new round of funding, Friendster has raised $45 million to date.  The $20 million in funding was Friendster’s Series D.  Previous investors include Battery Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and DAG Ventures.

Kimber ran the South Asian operations and partnerships for Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG).  Kimber is one of many executives that have been plucked from Google by social networks.  Facebook hired Josef Desimone and Sheryl Sandberg from Google within the past year.

Ironically, Google made an exclusive search and ad deal with Friendster around March 2007.  Yahoo!  Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) was Friendster’s previous search partner.

Kent Lindstrom, Friendster’s former CEO will become Senior VP of Corporate Development of Friendster.  Lindstrom worked as a senior executive for Friendster since 2006.

As Friendster continues to increase in popularity around Asia, the social network has opened offices in the Philippines and Singapore.  Friendster is the number 1 social network in Asia, except for China.  QQ is the current leader in China.

Friendster is available in languages such as Indonesian and Vietnames.  Friendster currently has 75 million registered users.

What Friendster should do with this new round of funding is hire a plethora of young developers to rehaul the current look and feel of the site.  The profile pages still look very congested.

Related Links:
1. Friendster
2. NYT
3. CNET
4. WSJ

Friendster has officially launched a mobile version of their web site.  This a much-needed addition in order to keep up with the Joneses.  The Joneses include Facebook Mobile, Google Mobile, and MySpace Mobile.

Through the mobile version of Friendster, users can check out check messages, review friend requests, post shoutouts to friends, browse through photos, browse user profiles, search for users, add posts bulletins.

Friendster is the biggest social network with 50 million users and about 34 million uniques per month in Asia alone.  Friendster has 70 million members worldwide.  How many of them are active?  Who knows?  I lost interest after about a year.

Below is a gallery of the mobile version of the site:

For Meez’s 3-D avatars, users can set the clothes, body style, and hair. After that, the avatars can be animated and embedded into any profile page. The music applications immediately ask the users which songs they would like to embed. The music applications has some preselected songs that the user can have embedded on the site or gives the option to play music that is connected to one’s music collection iTunes or Windows Media Player using a plug-in. Nifty.

I think the way that Friendster is opening up applications is much more organized than Facebook. Friendster seems to be more knit-picky about the types of applications that are added. The Facebook approach was more of a shoot first, ask questions later approach. I guess between social networks, each one seems to be learning from each other in some way. Back when Facebook first started, they were knit-picky about where the users actually came from. The exclusivity of Facebook’s initial user-base was their core competency and gave them enough time to prepare for scaling a large user-base.