Tuesday, June 09, 2009

World map of Social Networks

I found a world map of Social Network Site!!
http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/
This map is issued not from research companies,
but from a blogger who makes use of the data from Alexa and from Google trend.
Then, the confidence level for the map might be low.

Even so, the map is enough inspiring to know that how the whole world is divided by Social Networking Sites(SNS in below). Furthermore, it is also impressive that some countries have their own SNS site, not depending on Facebook and MySpace.

According to the map, most influential and no. 1 world wide SNS site is Facebook.
Especially, it is obvious that Facebook expand its power over Europe, Australasia and South/North America.

On the other hand, some countries, which seemed to cluster in Asia region, resister to this world trend. For example, 'Orkut' is famous in India, Brazil and Estonia. 'QQ' is well-known SNS site in China. Among more minor site, there are other SNS sites called 'Mixi' which is popular in Japan, 'Lwiw' which is famous in Hungary and 'Nasza-Kiasa' well known in Poland.

These distributions might be related to the first mover advantage, their mother language and own culture. For example, in Japanese Mixi is only for Japanese speaker. There is no other alternative language in the site. Furthermore, users usually write long sentences in the site which looks like a kind of diary, not short comments as the Facebook has. I think the feature well fits to Japanese nationality.

However, I wonder if those minor sites will be able to compete with giant SNS site in future, because the source of influential power is surely the scale of network. In other word, the large scale network become, more useful and more fun the site is. And the world popular SNS sites can easily fit and overcome the language barrier and nationality.

We will see the map being painted only light green color in some day which stands for Facebook? Or another color will be appearing in every country?

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