Friendster's Comeback? and Cute Marketing Thoughts for the Weekend

Happy Friday... Some thoughts to take you into the weekend. You know, 'can't take the Assignment Editor out of the boy...' -- see if you can follow the random train of thought:

I’ve been told that there are strange things afoot in From the land of ET+12, (aka Asia).

Yesterday, I attended a panel with the Strategic Web Insights Group, hosted by Dan Mooney and Devin Brown. It was my second meeting, and I’ve met some very interesting people there before. Sat next to Marshall Sponder, who I’ve been running into for about the past six months here and there. Anyway, the discussion was about Presenting KPIs to Management, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

First, from the Foreign Desk... Facebook is still growing -- in Asia

From a couple guys by way of NBC Universal (Digital Research Director Blandon Casenave, and someone I didn’t know) , I learned that in Asia, the most popular online social community is Friendster, believe it or not.

A little background: according to Venturebeat, in the current international land-grab among leading social networks (N.B.: have you staked your claim on your @Handle yet on Twitter? Bought your name’s URL?), the almighty Facebook is overtaking MySpace (my old employer, NewsCorp) as the largest social network in the world.

That’s old news now to anyone in the know. Here’s the rub though: remember ol’ Friendster, which the grownups were digging Pre-FB, and then completely bailed on when FB came around?

Well, in Asia, Friendster continues to lead Facebook and everyone else by at least a two to one margin. Like increase its base nearly double from 23 million monthly active users in April of 2007, to 40 million users this past April 2008 (old numbers – anyone have any more current?), according to comScore. And it appears to trending still upwards On top of that, the Friendster people point out that comScore doesn’t account for users who access the site through internet cafes, which is a much larger user trend than in the US. And get this: comScore March ’08 data says that Friendster users spend an average of 229 minutes on the site per month, the highest of any social network. If anyone has any more recent data on this, to prove/disprove the trend, we can get all Mythbustery on it. If I have the time, I’ll dig a bit.

Google's New Online Ad Campaign for Chrome

Also, from that geographical area, apparently there’s a ‘battle for search engine supremacy” in Japan, between Yahoo and Google. On one of the fronts, Google is introducing its Chrome browser into the Land of the Rising Sun. From boingboing, this cleverly-crafted stop-motion video advertisement was put together by the Google Japan team. It shows the company’s strategic vision of using the Japanese cute factor (or kawaii, like “Hello Kitty”) to successfully enter their browser into a market currently dominated by Yahoo. Feels evocative of something you’d see on the newly-launched Electric Company, in its first iteration.

And it’s cuter on this side of the pond too…

From the New York Times: I Lego NY

Iconic elements of New York City rendered in Lego. Brilliant. Utilizing everyone’s familiarity with Lego pieces, not only their strengths of being able to put them together, but the limitations that go along with their modular architecture. It’s Pop Art, using found objects and the viewers imagination to complete.