Nielsen/Netratings has finally released a report on Friendster. Here is the pdf. I find it curious that Friendster was classified as "Member Community" and then compared with "Dating Services" like Yahoo personals, match.com, etc. If the original idea behind Friendster was dating, then Nielsen/Netratings denied it that classification. The report discloses that Friendster has smaller user base but more devoted users who spend on average about 2!! hours using the system. I am wondeirng how many just have it running in the background and periodically hit reload just to see if they got any personal messages. Although I suppose profile editing takes time.
I wonder what it is that users DO on Friendster since there isn't that much to do once the novelty of browsing your friends' friends wears off. For the most part (before the critical mass on friendster reached the point where people were discovering they were already connected to friends) my informal interviews returned that users found friendster intriguing and mostly useless. The most common question was - so what the hell is this thing for? I don't think most people can answer still, but the visualisation of the architecture of the social network is very interesting. (it would have been more intersting if it were possible to see how many of your friends are connected to each other as well).
I am curious to see what will happen to Friendster (and the associated researchy broohaha around it) when it goes paid and tries to make money on its subscribers. If the majority of users still perceive it as an ingtriguing but largely useless way to waste time, things might not be so chipper. Although, who knows... arcades used to do pretty well in the old days :).
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