Friendster Deploys Industry's First Highly Scalabale Six-Degree Social Networking Graph Server

SAN FRANCISCO, June 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Friendster, Inc. (http://www.friendster.com/) today announced the successful deployment of its proprietary, next-generation, highly scalable graph server that tracks the connection relationships among its 45 million users around the world. Friendster's graph server is the first in the industry to manage in real time how any two users are connected up to six degrees away. Traditional social networks only keep track of basic first-degree connections in the form of a "friends list."

This powerful technology has been deployed for the sole benefit of Friendster users, providing unparalleled user control over who can view their profiles and who can contact them through a variety of communications features. In addition, Friendster users find information about how they are connected to another user to be both useful and entertaining.

Friendster users can precisely control access to profile information and inbound communications based on the degrees of separation connecting users. Examples of the user controls that are powered by this graph server technology include:

  -- Who can view my full profile?
     -- My Friends
     -- Two Degrees
     -- Anyone
  -- Who can send me messages?
     -- My Friends
     -- Two Degrees
     -- Three Degrees
     -- Anyone
  -- When receiving a message, I also receive an e-mail notification for:
     -- My Friends
     -- Two Degrees
     -- Anyone

"In this age of spam and unsolicited e-mails and communications, this is an excellent way that Friendster enables our users to control who views their profiles and their inbound communications," said David Jones, vice president of marketing. "Friendster offers the greatest control in the industry over who can view your profile and who can contact you."

Along with these unique controls available only on Friendster, users can also block specific users, allow access by geographic region (i.e., by continent), and turn on and off a wide variety of features and notifications. Friendster users can easily control this and much more via the "Settings" link at the top right of every page of the Friendster.com Web site.

"Millions of Friendster users are taking advantage of these settings and tell us they appreciate it. Other social networks either overly restrict viewing profiles and communications to just your friends, or they leave their users essentially wide open to anyone viewing their profiles and drowning in messages, e-mails, comments and other forms of potentially unwanted communications," said Jones.

By allowing friends of friends or friends of friends of friends to view a user's profile and/or contact that user, more "lost" old friends or current friends -- such as old high school or college friends, or friends they didn't know were already on Friendster -- can find and reconnect with the user on Friendster. Similarly, this allows people to meet to find an activity partner, become friends or potentially date, but with the valuable information that Friendster provides on how they are connected and whom they know.

Technology Overview

Friendster's new graph server is highly scalable and can manage up to six- degree connections globally. The engineering team at Friendster has designed, built and now deployed a system that can scale with Friendster's growing user base, increasing connectivity and activity occurring on the site.

"The first-generation graph server was reaching its maximum capacity. In order to keep these important access and control features in place for our users, we had to redesign it to support our rapidly growing user base," said Chander Sarna, senior vice president of engineering for Friendster. "This took us about six months, but it would have taken much longer had we not already acquired years of experience by building, enhancing and scaling our first-generation graph server."

Since the theory is that any user can be connected to anyone else based on no more than six degrees, or connections, the Friendster graph server determines this and presents that information to the user onsite. Users can see how they are connected with anyone else on Friendster by logging in to Friendster, going to any user profile page and clicking on the "View All" link under "how you're connected" in the upper right of the profile. How a user is connected to another user is usually determined in sub-seconds.

For Friendster's 45 million registered users, the Friendster graph server can determine how any two users are connected from approximately a quadrillion (1 X 1015) possible connection paths. Since Friendster is adding over 45,000 new users per day, these figures indicate the huge technical challenge that has been solved by Friendster's highly scalable graph server technology.

"The primary challenge is computing second-degree and third-degree graphs in real time. While this challenge is very difficult, we met it in a scalable, responsive way," said Sarna.

"We view this revolutionary technology as an asset, which provides Friendster with another competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving space," said Jones. "Friendster will continue to apply this technology to meeting the needs of its users in online social networking, and has already been approached about licensing it for use in other non-competing industries."

This highly scalable technology is necessary since Friendster continues to grow rapidly, essentially doubling its active number of users in the last year. Friendster has over 45 million registered users in over 75 countries around the world, and had 22.5 million monthly unique visitors in April 2007*. Friendster is now the 17th largest Web site in the world in terms of traffic, serving 6.4 billion page views in April 2007*. Friendster is global, ranking as a top 100 Web site in 17 countries on four continents.

About Friendster

With more than 45 million members worldwide, Friendster is a leading global online social network. Friendster is focused on helping people stay in touch with friends and discover new people and things that are important to them. Online adults, 18 and up, choose Friendster to connect with friends, family, school, groups, activities and interests. Friendster prides itself in delivering a clean, user-friendly and interactive environment where users can easily connect with anyone around the world. Friendster has a growing portfolio of patents granted to the company on social networking, with more expected over the next several months. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and individual investors. For more information, visit: http://www.friendster.com/.

*comScore Media Metrix