ajb{log}

ABS-CBN, in a statement said that it will acquire 2.5 million shares (5 percent stake) at Multiply, a Florida-based social networking site. Multiply is the second largest social networking site in the Philippines after Friendster.com. Multiply.com maybe catching up slowly with Friendster.com in terms of unique visitors (see Compete estimates below).

Friendster on the other hand, the most popular social networking site in the Philippines may be losing its steam after more than 2 days of downtime due to a data center power outage in Santa Clara, California. You just can’t seem to wonder how did Friendster allowed itself to be offline? Was it because it had a single point of failure? Having one data center housing more than 85 million users? Could a data mirror in Asia have helped since most of their active users are there?

In any event, Multiply just got a strong partner in the Philippines – media giant ABS-CBN. But will Multiply be able to grow their user-base in the Philippines with the help of ABS-CBN and overtake pinoy-favorite Friendster? The answer to this question might be sooner than later.

What are your thoughts?

Sources: Business Mirror, ABS-CBN

Stumpedia recently launched and claims to be a human-powered search.

Initial use proves that the search engine is fast (not super fast but OK fast). However, it still lacks content. Probably due to the fact that users might have to submit a site to be added to their database plus you need to signup to do that. Not sure if they have a bot to crawl after you added the main domain though.

One thing I noticed on the front page. Stumpedia is using Friendster‘s old image from 2003. While that image probably made Friendster popular in the Philippines. Copying and re-using it on your website will just not do you any good in many ways. In fact, it’s probably better to clean up the frontpage of Stumpedia.

Here’s an image from Friendster taken on February 2003

And here’s Stumpedia’s homepage

And although that plagiarism is the greatest form of flattery, I think the site a lot better without Friendster’s image. It reminds us of how uber slow Friendster at that time.

Besides, you might get an email from Friendster to take the image down.

We’ll see where this goes.

–aj

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Found at TechCrunch