About a week ago Friendster re-branded themselves and was rumored to be for sale. Malaysian company MOL Global has bought out Friendster.com, the social network a majority of us used before Facebook was introduced. Friendster’s biggest downfall was when they hit a scaling wall. Friendster really started slowing down at one point causing their users to move on to the next big thing faster than they expected. At least that is the reason why I switched.

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.

Friendster Inc., a top social network that saw Facebook take away a lot of their market share in the U.S. has announced that they have expanded offices and partnerships.  Friendster opened a new office in Singapore and in Sydney, Australia.

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.