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Where do you belong? Facebook or Friendster? We search the World Wide Web to find which got the number 1 spot.

Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. Users can add friends, send messages to them, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 300 million active users worldwide.

Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria, China and Iran, although Iran later u n b l o c k e d Facebook in 2009. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg’s former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

Meanwhile, Friendster is a privately owned social networking website. Its headquarters are in Sydney, Australia. The service allows users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website is also used for dating and discovering new events, bands, and hobbies. Users may share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via their profile and their network

Friendster has over 90 million registered users and over 61 million unique visitors a month globally. The website receives approximately 19 billion

page views per month, and is in the top 100 global websites based on web traffic.

Over 90% of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia. In Asia, Friendster has more monthly unique visitors than any other social network. The top 10 countries accessing Friendster, according to Alexa, as of May 7, 2009 are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States, Singapore, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and India.

According to compete.com, Facebook has 124,579,479 unique visitors while the Friendster has 1,156,102 unique visitors. The triumph of Facebook is due to the features and applications offered by Facebook that gives opportunity to its members to interact with friends on another level. Applications like Farmville and Mafia Wars lured Friendster users to switch to Facebook, because it makes social networking enjoyable, not boring.

However, Friendster has more privacy policies than Facebook. This gives assurance that you are protected from cyber-bullies. Also, Friendster is planning to launch something revolutionary to regain its former throne.
With the appearance of new social networking sites like Twitter, it is hard to tell how long Facebook will maintain its status as champion.

Now, which social networking site do you like to belong?

Researched and Review by: David Rabelas & Isaiah Montes