Group 4 proposal

To: Mr Jonathan Abrams Founder and Creator of Friendster

From: Group4
Chew Mei Jun, Tan Kai ling , Zhang Fan, Lay Hout

Date: 20 August 2007

Proposal on improving Friendster

Nowadays, social networking sites have become more and more popular than before. Due to this, our lives changed a lot. Those social networking website make us become more sociable among our friends. With sites such as Friendster, Blogger, Multiply, you can upload your favourite pictures and photos and write your own diary. Like this, your friends will know more about you and you can also keep in touch with you, so those sites provide a good opportunity for us to share our happiness with others. However, I find that there is always room for improvement.

As video conferencing is commonly used in MSN and QQ, so we propose to you to add video conferencing as a new feature to attract more users. Firstly, this feature allows users to communicate with each other and make sure that the person sitting in front of the computer is the one in the pictures posted. Hence, it protects some teenage users as they like to make friends with strangers. Video conferencing is also a more direct way to let the users’ friends know him. When you are online, your friends will see your vivid face while they are typing commands. This is really fun and more interactive than facing the computer all day long. They may lose the ability to communicate with people and turn antisocial over time. You don't want defeat the purpose of connecting people, do you? Also, this also creates a chance for those people who are busy working or studying in other countries to get to see their families. People no longer need to fly overseas to see their loved ones. As a result, more people will join Friendster.

Online shops are really hot these years for their convenience and discount, thus I strongly recommend Friendster cooperate with eBay and allow users to buy and sell stuff online. To start with, eBay is the biggest online trading website, many people like to search some cheap goods online or sell their things to others online. Different things can be posted up for sale with details about it and the price they are willing to give them up for. Currently, not many sites are providing such services so Friendster can give it a go. I am sure people would convert from using blogs to sell their stuff to using Friendster. Hence, Friendster can make a pact with eBay to make lives easier for online shoppers.

Lastly, Friendster should have a “Latest News” section to post news up. Most users of the Friendster are teenagers so all the more we should keep them in touch with current affairs and not let them cooped up in their own internet world. This feature will also attract people of older generations as they would visit Friendster to get a piece of the news daily.

I am looking forward to your reply. I will really hope that you can consider my ideas seriously and can accept my suggestion. Thank you.

Group 4