Profile... Why Roberto isn't making many friends in the US

Last year, Friendster, one of the fastest-dying players in the social networking scene, made a brilliant discovery: 70 per cent of its global traffic came from Southeast Asia.

Registered users in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia were clicking in more often than those in the US, with Singapore and Hong Kong close behind.

Suddenly the company, with 40 million registered users to date, wasn't so concerned about a certain News Corp cash cow and its 100 million. Especially not Jeff Roberto, global marketing manager of Friendster and one of the few marketing-based employees in the 30-strong team. Needless to say, he was excited about his first trip to a region where his company is better known than in his own country.

But how does he explain Friendster's popularity in this region? Two wild guesses: "One reason, I believe, is that we launched in San Francisco where a lot of immigrant Asians, between 18 to 30, were using the site to connect with their friends back home. And then those friends connected to others in-market," he says.

"Another is that it's in English, which is why there are far more users in Southeast Asia than North Asia."

But given that these are just broad conjectures about his biggest market, Roberto is rolling up his sleeves. "We need to do a lot more research in this region," he admits. "We'll be working with media agencies and sending through surveys integrated on our site, which is where we get a lot of feedback. We've also had sales reps throughout the region for some time now."

Roberto may have a steep learning curve ahead. but he's the wily sort, having survived the dotcom bust during his days at Napster and Priceline.com. And he clearly enjoys a good challenge, given that he joined Friendster at its nadir in 2005.

It was that year that Friendster almost fell off the web radar. Arguably the catalyst of the social networking phenomenon when it began in 2002, its army of users and advertisers quickly went AWOL with the proliferation of kingpins such as MySpace, Orkut and Facebook. The company was also humbled by a plague of negative media coverage. Most shocking among this was the ‘Friendster Tell-All' story in the New York Times last year, which revealed that the company had passed on a US$30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003, the Year of Friendster.

Shortly after, it found its loyal registrants spending time elsewhere, amid complaints of slow page loads, clumsy navigation and irritating pop-up ads.

But during this downtime, according to Roberto, the engineers were busy. The problem appeared to be that the company had grown too big, too quickly, with an infrastructure that simply couldn't support its sudden scale.

Most of these problems have been tweaked though, Roberto claims. For example, a team has been dedicated solely to ensuring faster page views. The interface has also been cleaned up and users can embed content from third party sites, such as videos from YouTube or pictures from Flickr.

"I want to give a lot of credit to the engineering and product," Roberto says. "It's a lot better now, but we're not done yet. 2005 was an especially quiet period for us, but we're going to be out there much more than we used to be."

A recent headliner is its exclusive tie-up with Google as search engine and display advertising provider, eschewing its non-exclusive deal with Yahoo. Another addition which will especially benefit Asia is the ability to find classmates, new and old.

The success of a school-based social connection was proven by Facebook in the US, a site that's barely been exposed in this part of the world. "Lots of the major universities in the region are already on our new school pages, but we're aggressively adding schools here," Roberto says, "It's an example of really wanting to cater to this market." The company has also, after over two years of effort, finally received its first software patent last year, and will keep filing for more. "Hopefully, this will stop copycat portals," he says.

And he would know, given that he says he's signed up on the top 10 networking sites. Call it passion or addiction, but Roberto is clearly engaged with his product: "I'm on my Friendster page now, in fact," he says, pointing to the blinking laptop screen in front of him. "I think it's safe to say that I breathe, sleep and eat social networking."

This might explain why he has 374 ‘friends' on his Friendster list. His profile also reveals hobbies such as ‘DJ-ing' and ‘Dunkin Donuts coffee'.

He might also add ‘irony' to that list, given a more incriminating photo in his portfolio: a picture of himself posing in front of News Corp's headquarters, arms spread out and a look that seems to say, "Hey Rupert, bring it on."

Jeff Roberto's CV
2005 Global marketing manager, Friendster
2000 E-commerce manager, Roxio/Napster
1998 Marketing executive, Priceline.com