Friendster meets... everything?

I hadn't logged in to Friendster for a long time. Although I have accounts on some social networking sites, I'm not big on the whole scene. An old friend left me a message on Friendster, so I logged in recently. I was surprised to see a whole bunch of changes, which were .. somewhat neat, somewhat annoying.

The word convergence took a whole new meaning when I saw blogs, videos, classifieds, photos, customizable pages and more! It is a case of Friendster meets Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, Blogger, Match.com and MySpace. Nice concept, but is that enough to get people on Friendster? And keep them there?

Although I was impressed with the changes Friendster has made, I was very turned off by how bad the overall design and navigation is. Not to mention Friendster taking you to a whole page of advertisments when you are trying to get to another page. It definitely is not the type of ad you overlook or are trained to ignore, so, in a way, it is effective. Annoying, nonetheless.

Where's the marketing and promotion for all these new and great features anyways? I've been on Friendster for a while and I didn't know about them till a few days ago. How will they get new users to sign up? There's still more that can be done to make Friendster better. Will we see a chat program directly from Friendster, like Google Talk? Maybe link up with cell phone providers and offer discounted text messages, or just enable users to text message directly from their Friendster account.. there's a lot more that can be done.

Once again, great concept, followed by not so great execution.