An Interview with Jeff Roberto

1. How does Friendster address issues like privacy? Or even cyber-related criminal activity?

Friendster continues to launch and support numerous features around privacy and safety and strives to be a secure place to connect with friends. Here’s an overview of our safety and privacy feature set:

Friendster registration is 16+

Friendster supports an extensive set of member account settings; members can decide who can see their profile and who can send them messages by each of the following:
My Friends, Friends of Friends, or Anyone

The above privacy settings can also be set by Region (Continent)

Friendster supports a degree network (first, second, third degree graph) that shows how you know people and how you’re connected on the network

Friendster does not collect physical addresses and does not disclose member e-mail addresses to other members

Friendster supports a “who’s viewed me” feature that displays other members who have viewed your profile (this is an optional setting)

All Friendster profiles contain a “report” link for easy flagging and notification of the Friendster Member Services team

Customer Service monitors the network for offensive material and responds promptly
to users who have reported other users’ offensive or inappropriate material/behavior


2. How do you see social networking sites changing the digital landscape in the next three years? Any forecasts or predictions?

If you look at the top 20 sites on the web today, you’ll notice that about 30-40% of them are social networking or social media sites, this wasn’t the case just 5 years ago. The social networking space is still evolving and we’ll continue to see growth here. Looking at the numbers, there are approximately 1.4 billion people online today globally, and about 194 million of them aged 16-64 manage a profile on a social network, that’s only 17% adoption! More than 800 million internet users have yet to adopt a social network, and the global internet population will continue to grow.