Friendster is an Internet social network service. The Friendster site was founded in Mountain View, California, United States by Jonathan Abrams in March 2002 and is privately owned. Friendster is based on the Circle of Friends and Web of Friends techniques for networking individuals in virtual communities and demonstrates the small world phenomenon.[citation needed] It currently has more than 85 million members worldwide and is mostly used in Asia. Based on Alexa.com, Friendster ranks 2nd most visited website in the Philippines. It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts. David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, said that "the biggest percentage of users is from the Philippines, clocking in with 39 percent of the site's traffic." Also, it caters to men and women interested in meeting people due to different reasons. Such reasons are: looking for friends; looking for activity partners; relationship with men; relationship with women; or just looking around.
Online chat is a way of communicating by sending text messages to people in the same chat-room in real-time. Some chat rooms such as Yahoo! use both text and voice simultaneously. The oldest form of true chat rooms are the text-based variety. Talkomatic, developed on the PLATO System around 1974, has a strong claim to have been the prototype of the text-only chat room. A notable 1980's text-based chat system was Freelancing' Round table. The most popular of this kind is Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The popularity of these kinds of chat rooms has waned over the years, and IRC's popularity has rapidly given way to instant messaging. Also a notable number of people were introduced to chat rooms from AOL and web chat sites.
There are also graphical user interface (GUI) text-based chat rooms which allow users to select an identifying icon and modify the look of their chat environment.
There are also graphical user interface (GUI) text-based chat rooms which allow users to select an identifying icon and modify the look of their chat environment.
