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"Friendster might not be the first name in social networking in the US, but in Asia it\u2019s the dominant player in many countries, with a userbase totaling more than 60 million across the continent.  Today, the company is announcing that Facebook applications can now be easily ported into Friendster \u2013 who already has its own developer platform and also supports OpenSocial.  \nThis could be attractive to Facebook developers for a number of reasons, especially considering the negative impact that the site\u2019s recent re-design is having on usage for some applications.  For the most part, Friendster\u2019s audience has little overlap with that of Facebook \u2013 only 22% according to the companies \u2013 meaning there are about 45 million potential new users for developers to target.  Further, for the moment the Friendster developer community is far less competitive than that of Facebook \u2013 its directory features only about 600 applications as opposed to the tens of thousands that have already been built for Facebook.  \nThus, the challenge for developers who port their applications over to Friendster is not necessarily the competition \u2013 though Slide, RockYou, and other big widget makers own many of the most popular apps \u2013 but making them attractive to a largely different audience.  \nTo that end, developers would be well served to utilize Facebook\u2019s tools for translating applications into foreign languages as part of their effort to gain Friendster users.  Friendster does not currently offer its own translation tools, though Jeff Roberto, the company\u2019s Director of Marketing says that \u201CIf the application currently works in multiple languages and has been translated we will support it.\u201D\nAs for monetization, Friendster gives most of the control to developers.  In a statement, the company writes: \u201CAds 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.\u201D\nMeanwhile, this launch would seem to indicate that Facebook will continue to push its own platform and steer clear of joining Google\u2019s OpenSocial for the foreseeable future.  To enable developers to port their Facebook applications, Friendster made use of the open source version of the Facebook platform known as fbOpen.  \nIn addition to Friendster, Bebo also  leverages fbOpen to allow developers to import Facebook applications (while simultaneously supporting OpenSocial as well).  In turn, Facebook can claim to offer a developer community with access to hundreds of millions of users \u2013 on par with that of OpenSocial, whose members include dozens of sites such as MySpace, hi5, and LinkedIn."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/10/02/port-facebook-apps-to-friendster/>