Sorry about the lack of updates.  The site will be moving to a new server, and undergoing some changes soon.

Social networking pioneer Friendster, founded in 2001 by Jonathan Abrams, has been completely sold by its private investors – namely venture capital and private equity firms that had acquired total ownership of the company from its original owners over the years through multiple rounds of equity financing -  for an estimated price of just over $100 million, based on annecdotal reports in the blogosphere and the Financial Times of London.

Google had offered to acquire them in 2003 for approximately $30 million. On a cash basis, that looks like a decent return on investment since the company raised over $50 million in equity financing and it does best Google’s offer. However, had that $30 million buyout by Google been paid in Google stock, which has soared over the years, it’s easy to speculate the original owners could’ve done better selling out to Google especially since Friendster was more popular at the time. Hindsight is always 20/20, however. (Peter Kafka of The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD blog, writing in his online Media Memo column, apparently agrees with this author’s assessment.)

The buyer of Friendster is a Kuala Lampur, Malaysia-based company called MOL Global Pte. Ltd. and will be integrated into its Retail and Payment Channels division intent on forming a leading social-networking content distribution and e-commerce company in its geographic regions.

Friendster’s growth and usage in North America and other areas flatlined several years ago and southeast Asia has the been the only region where they have been growing and, today, is the region that makes up the majority of their active registered users.

Author’s Editorial: Personally, I was an early Friendster user but deleted my account a number of years ago – just before its North American usage started to flatline. I think that’s how you’ll see second- and third-tier social networking sites such as Friend Circles, Hi5, Multiply, Orkut, Piczo and others eventually realize their exits. (Orkut is technically owned by Google but with its dramatically falling usage to Facebook everyday and its entire user base almost exclusively in Brazil and other South American countries, it’s only a matter of time before Google kills the site or sells it off and realizes some monetary gain.) Large regionalized multinationals that can afford to spend a couple hundred million and not need to realize a profit on the buy will acquire sites that are similarly strong in their respective regions. It’s already happened with Friendster rival LiveJournal being sold by Six Apart several years ago to Russian online media giant SUP and early instant messaging pioneer ICQ reportedly being on the auction block by newly re-incorporated and independent company AOL Inc. potentially sold to South African Internet service and content provider Naspers Group for an estimated $300 million.

Google has launched their own public DNS service.  DNS is what your computer uses to locate domain name information so that you can connect to web sites and other internet services by typing in a domain name, rather than an IP address.

This service should compete with the other alternative DNS provider, OpenDNS.

Many ISPs, and even the OpenDNS service, are violating the name server standards by imporperly handling miss-typed or non-existent domains, all in the name of convenience.   For example, if you accidentally type browserwaresss.com when trying to access this site, the correct response should be a “not found” error that is sent back to your browser.  Instead, OpenDNS and ISPs are violating the standard by setting up their own for-profit search pages, which will attempt to list what you could be looking for, and often contain advertisements.  This non-standard behavior also breaks many applications that rely on DNS accuracy to preform properly.  If a program is designed to look for a certain domain and preform different actions based on whether or not the site exists, the program will always believe that every domain it tries to access exists because it is not receiving the proper response from the DNS servers.

How does Google Public DNS handle non-existent domains?

If you issue a query for a domain name that does not exist, Google Public DNS always returns an NXDOMAIN record, as per the DNS protocol standards. The browser should show this response as a DNS error. If, instead, you receive any response other than an error message (for example, you are redirected to another page), this could be the result of the following:

A client-side application such as a browser plug-in is displaying an alternate page for a non-existent domain.

Some ISPs may intercept and replace all NXDOMAIN responses with responses that lead to their own servers. If you are concerned that your ISP is intercepting Google Public DNS requests or responses, you should contact your ISP.

Another advantage of the Google DNS is that the IPs for the service are easy to remember:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

Google claims this service is fast.  On top of the non-standard behavior, many ISPs often provide customers with overloaded or misconfigured name servers that can slow down your entire online experience.

For more information, including instructions on setting up the Google DNS servers for your platform, see the official product page.

From the old news department…

Facebook launched a “Lite” version of their site back in September.  CNet calls it “twitter like.” The site is designed for users with low bandwidth connections, so the layout is slimmed down, but the News Feed is otherwise the same as regular Facebook.

Facebook Lite News Feed page, via C|Net

To me, the main attraction is the lack of the 3rd party applications.  You can still see status updates, photos, video, events, and even the Facebook Instant Message feature via a popup window, but you’re not going to see any Super Pokes, Farmville updates, or Mob War invites.

Facebook Lite view of Mark Zuckerberg's page/profile

The Profile View also closely resembles the older Facebook layouts.  As someone who has used Facebook since before the apps were even an option, I like it.  I’ve been avoiding Facebook recently, mostly because of all the app and interface bloat, but this interface may be enough to keep me as a frequent user.

If you’re on a low bandwidth connection, or if you just want to use Facebook without the extras, head on over to Facebook Lite.

Protip:  You can set Facebook lite to be your default interface when visiting Facebook.com under the Settings page

CNET reports that Google is looking to dump their Gears technology in favor of the HTML5 standard.  Gears is a proprietary plugin for modern browsers (or in the case of Google’s Chrome browser, a built in feature) that allows for features such as offline support for web apps, such as Gmail and Google Docs.  The HTML5 standard enables most of the functionality of Gears in an industry standard fashion, without requiring non-standard plugins.

Linus Upson, Google’s engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, confirmed Tuesday that Gears will be supported but isn’t an active area of development.

“This isn’t an area we’ve been investing a lot in the last year since we launched Chrome. We’re very focused on making HTML5 as successful a standard as possible,” Upson said. “Gears applications will run well for the foreseeable future,” though, he added.

On November 30th, MacRumors confirmed that Google Gears would not be a feature in the upcoming release of the Google Chrome browser for Mac OS X.

HTML5 does look very promising, with features that could easily replace proprietary technology like Gears, Silverlight, and Flash.  Let’s just hope that Adobe and Microsoft don’t put up too much of a fight as their technology is proven to be unnecessary bribe too many media companies to stick with their stuff.