Before Facebook rewired our brains and TikTok finished the job, there was Friendster. If you were online in Malaysia between 2003 and 2009, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Testimonials. Profile songs. Competing with your friends to see who could rack up more connections. Spending way too long picking the perfect profile picture when cameras were still measured in kilopixels. It was a whole era, and for a lot of us, it was genuinely our first taste of what the internet could be when it felt personal. Now I feel nostalgic.
Anyway, it's back.
Friendster relaunched in April 2026 as a brand new iOS app, rebuilt entirely from scratch by a programmer named Mike Carson. He spent years tracking down the expired domain, paid around USD 30,000 for it, then quietly secured the trademarks in 2025. The man had a vision. Whether that vision is genius or madness, we'll get to that.
But first, a word of warning if you're feeling nostalgic: your old account is gone. Photos, testimonials, your carefully curated profile, none of it exists anymore. The new Friendster has zero connection to the original platform beyond the name. So if you were hoping to recover that 2007 version of yourself, you're out of luck. Probably for the best, honestly.
What Carson built instead is genuinely strange by today's standards, and I mean that as a compliment.
To add someone as a friend on Friendster, you both have to open the app and physically tap your phones together. That's it. That's the whole onboarding process. No sending requests to strangers, no scrolling through suggested contacts, no accidentally adding your boss. If you haven't met someone in person, they don't exist on your Friendster. Carson said the idea came from Hacker News feedback, and honestly it's the kind of thing that sounds ridiculous until you think about how exhausting modern social media has become.
The app also has no ads, no algorithm pushing content at you, and no selling of your data. Your feed only shows posts from people you've physically connected with. There are no influencers and no recommended content that keep you scrolling until 2am wondering what happened to your evening. For anyone who has ever opened TikTok for five minutes and come out the other side an hour and forty-five minutes later feeling vaguely worse about their life, that pitch lands differently than it might have a few years ago.
There's also a feature Carson calls "fading connections." If you and a friend go a full year without tapping phones together, the app starts to treat that connection as dormant. It's basically a gentle nudge that says, hey, are you actually still friends with this person or are you just keeping them around out of habit? Which, if we're being honest, describes about 60% of most people's Facebook lists.
As of early May 2026, the app hit number two on Apple's App Store free apps chart, which tells you there's genuine curiosity out there. Carson says he's not really in it for the money, though he'll probably introduce some paid features down the line to keep things running.
The catch right now is that it's iOS only. Android users will have to wait, and there's no confirmed timeline for that yet. Given that Android dominates the Malaysian market, that's a fairly significant limitation if this thing ever wants to catch on here.
Whether Friendster becomes something people actually use long-term, or just a fun two-week nostalgia experiment before everyone quietly deletes it, is genuinely hard to predict. But the core idea, that maybe social media works better when it's actually social, is hard to argue with. We've been staring at content from strangers for so long that an app asking you to go outside and tap phones feels almost radical.
Maybe that's exactly the point.
Kamarul Azwan (k.azwan@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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