Friendster launches Fan Profiles

Facebook and MySpace may get all the media attention these days, but social networking pioneer Friendster isn't resting on its laurels. The site got over 10 billion page views last month, making it one of the most trafficked sites on the web.

A few days ago Friendster, which is apparently huge in the Pacific Asian region launched a Chinese language version of the site. Today, Friendster announced another new feature: fan profiles.

While musicians, actors, comedians, and politicians have been using social networking sites to find new fans and keep existing fans informed, they often have to work within the constraints of a social networking platform. For example, every time a Friendster user wants to befriend a band, the person managing that band's profile needs to approve the friend request. Fan profiles does away with that. You can set your account to automatically accept friend requests.

The fan profiles service has been in beta for the last month or two. Users have been able to befriend celebrities, non-profits, and other "entities," but until today the fan profile creation tools were invite-only. Now anyone can create a fan profile. Right now the easiest way to find fan profiles is to search for someone like Hillary Clinton or Dane Cook (seriously, both were involved in the beta). You can also browse through all the fan profiles, but right now there's no way to sort profiles by categories like actors, singers or politicians.