Friendster has currently about 120 million users, which is dwarfed by Facebook's 300 million users. The interesting thing is we can't just compare the strengths of Facebook vs Friendster by looking at the difference in number of users, 180 million. It is unlike comparing telephone penetration of countries in the old days of the 1970-80s where the business model is a lot straight forward.

The main difference here lies in the social networking effects where each user of a social networking site can be connected, in theory, to anyone in the network. In other words, the number of potential connections that can be generated by a difference of 180 million users is simply mind boggling.

Putnam (1993) views social capital as “features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action”. In other words, organizations that command a prestige position in a social structure has “competitive advantage in pursuing their ends” (Burt 2000).

In sociology terms, the social capital of Friendster is several orders of magnitude lower than that of Facebook, which also has a superior competitive advantage against any other public social networking sites.

Given that Friendster has its majority of users (over 90 percent) just from Southeast Asia - Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, it is risking bulldozed by Facebook with its limited growth potential as well.

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