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Friendster – the popular social networking that started in March 2003 had a problem in their system as a result of power outage in their outsourced data center in Santa Clara, California. For the past few days, subscribers to the online social network were complaining about having unknown people in their friends’ list or they lost lots of their friends in the list. Rumors started to spread like a wildfire that Friendster was actually hacked but turned out a hoax.

Friendster said it was not only their company that experienced the unscheduled downtime. “As a result, Friendster, as well as a number of other online companies, experienced unscheduled and unavoidable downtime. At this time, Friendster is back online and our team is working quickly to restore everything back to normal,” the company said Tuesday, November 18, 2008.

In addition, the Friendster team also clarified in their blog that despite the inconsistencies in the number of friends, the original data for friends’ list is not lost and is intact. They are in fact working through the friends list update for every user’s account now, all 85 million of them.

Ever since they started the service – it has been expanding exponentially at the rate of 20% each week. Friendster did absorb real-life people, social groups into a very large virtual network thus help users find jobs, dates, and new friends by connecting people with each other.

When one sign up, she posts her photo and write something about her, brief background, hobbies and interests. Then you give list of your friends together with their email addresses. Friendster then contacts these people to join your network and when they too sign up, they are asked to confirm their relationship with you. This then gain their access to your profile, your friends and the friends of your friends, and the friends of your friends’ friends.

In 2004, Danah Boyd, who was then a Berkeley Ph, D. student researching for an online social networking commented that Friendster have an unbelievable impact on its demographic target – the urban ranging 25 to 35 years old. It becomes too popular to the point that the word ‘friendster” alone would mean a person that someone meets or knows through the network.

Recent report revealed that out of the 39 million visitors of Friendster that was recorded in March 2008, about 13.2 million of them are from Asia and specifically the Philippines. Therefore if there are 14 million Internet users in the Philippines as of 2007, about 98 percent are going to Friendster.

A Friendster executive has even said that these figures indicate that Filipino people make up the biggest population of Friendster users in the world, and even surpassed the United States, where the service was originally launched.