Most Americans have probably already forgotten about social networking pioneer Friendster in favour of more hip MySpace or Facebook. Likewise, Friendster had crossed out the U.S. market along with the rest of the world except for Asia!

At least that was my impression when chatting with Friendster CEO Kent Lindstrom (pictured) just after his afternoon panel here at TiEcon. As we all know, numbers don't lie: 50 million out of the 68 million Friendster subscribers are in Asia, mainly in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. That's double the size of any other social network. Friendster staff is also half in San Francisco and the other half in Asia. And the company has no intention in trying to compete in any other market but where they have already a strong foothold i.e. Asia... see the pattern?

My guess is that Friendster is trying to play its Asia hand as good/fast as possible to create as much value possible (e.g. by looking at virtual goods) before it gets acquired, either by another social network (the big 2 are now pushing hard in Asia) or a bit media company a-la News Corp.