WebProNews

Intense competition from News Corp's MySpace may have 2002 social networking darling Friendster ready to play "Let's Make A Deal."

Stephanie Olsen at Cnet wrote about the likely sale of Friendster, preferably sooner rather than later as MySpace continues to devour the social networking space.

Though no one is commenting on the record, Cnet claimed Friendster has engaged Santa Monica-based Montgomery and Co., an investment banking firm, to help the company find a way out of Web 2.0.

Cnet's secret source said Friendster wanted $200 million to secure its affections. Now that figure has been lowered dramatically, possibly as low as $50 million.

Blame MySpace for Friendster's fall from grace. When News Corp grabbed MySpace parent Intermix, it got MySpace's 33 million users in the deal. MySpace has become a virtual offshoot of the music industry, with notable bands debuting albums there and A&R reps hunting among its listings for new talent.

Friendster has seen its traffic plunge, netting only 585,000 unique visitors in September as the site realigns itself as a dating/personals destination. That's a heavily-competed space, with big portals like Yahoo and AOL, and dating niche sites like Match, Cupid, and True among a slew of competitors.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.