Saturday, August 11, 2007

The geography of social networking sites

Each country or community has its preferred social networking web site. Knowing which site the people from a certain country prefer, you can be sure to have the best odds of meeting a person from that country or community, at that particular web site.
A preferred social networking site is not only the networking site where people from a specific country are the most numerous, it's also the site where they are the most active. Below is the list of social networking web sites I've come up, with after a few years of being a member of most of them.

  • Friendster for Filipinos/Asians
  • The first person who invited me to join Friendster was a Filipina. Though Friendster may be more popular in the Philippines than it is in other Asian countries, most Asians I've met online have a Friendster profile.
  • Myspace for Americans
  • Myspace is extremely popular in the United States but its success doesn't seem to have spread too much worldwide.
  • Orkut for Indians and Brazilians
  • I've received spam in Portuguese from Brazilian spammers who found my email through Orkut. I have three Gmail accounts, and the only one on which I receive those "Brazilian" spam messages is the one I use to connect to Orkut. Though I don't have any Brazilian contacts on Orkut, many of the Indian friends I've met online are there with their family, friends and coworkers.
  • Perfspot for Turks
  • I've notice a high number of Turkish people on Perfspot, I'm guessing the founders must be Turkish or of Turkish origins.

I personally prefer Friendster for the look and easiness of use, Hi5 for the community, and Orkut for flexibility and control over your information. I'm not a Myspace member and I've only started using Perfspot this year, unless the later go through a major update and aggressive marketing campaign it will die soon enough. I guess it's hard to have all your social networking needs met by only one web site.

How about you? What's your favorite Social Networking Site? Please tell me by living a comment to this post and also remember to specify your country.


Related Posts:
Friendster, Hi5 and Orkut
Perfspot - Yet Another Social Networking Site
Meeting People Online - Part I

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for visiting me at feelingflirty.

I had no idea Friendster was the site of choice for the Philippines. That's really interesting. I have always found Myspace to be filled with kids who try to act older than they should. It's a worry. For myself I prefer a more adult crowd where I can feel more flirty. :)

Anonymous said...

Hi feelingflirty,
Thanks for stopping by. Sorry for not giving any feedback sooner but I had problems submitting my comment on Blogger yesterday.
Friendster is indeed the social networking site of choice for people from the Philippines. In fact it's one of the most popular web sites there. Still, I'm wondering, where do you go to find your preferred adult crowd?

NIHAL said...

Hello Marguerite,

A lot of Malaysian's whom I know, also tend to use the Friendster site besides the occasional MySpace networks. I personally do not subscribe to any of them so can't really say much about their benefits.

Anonymous said...

Hi Nihal, it seems Friendster is not popular in the Philippines only but in Asia in general. What are you waiting for to jump on the social networking bandwagon?