If you follow the big social networks (Facebook, Myspace etc) you will be forgiven to assume that, its them who have all the users. There are several other social network in English with millions of users who are not covered in the news as often.

Also check out Social Networks in the Far East where Facebook is relatively unknown.

5 networks I can guarantee would surprise you ! With millions of users and still undiscovered by the geek community in the Valley/London. Common theme through all these sites are:

1. They have the option to browse in several languages
2. Their user base is very well distributed
3. Most of the social networks were developed outside the US

Hyves.net

Number of Members: 7,000,000
Country of Origin: Netherlands
Created On: October 2004

The site doesn’t look like your typical Web 2.0 but has Dutch youth absolutely loving it. 70% of the users are Dutch. Think Bebo for Dutch speakers ! The site is so popular that the prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende built his profile on Hyves.

myHeritage

Number of Members: 23,697,081
Country of Origin: Israel
Created On: 2003

As the name suggests its a network for family members. The site has over 2,733,433 family trees. Wow!

bahu

Number of Members: 300,000
Country of Origin: France
Created On: April 2007

The site is built for students by students, the team spread around Europe. The site looks good and is well designed with a lot of focus on usability which is fantastic. Although if I’m honest I don’t see anything new on the profiles which I haven’t seen on other social networks. Saying that you don’t have to be very very unique to be successful.

Fotolog

Number of Members: 20 million (unique) users
Country of Origin: United States
Created On: May 2002

Fotolog is one of the oldest and largest sites for sharing pictures through online photo diaries or photo blogs. The site was acquired by a French company for Euro 65,800,000. The site is very different from photobucket, flickr, slide etc. I think photo diaries have their own space on the web.

HospitalityClub.org

Number of Members: 386,550
Country of Origin: Germany
Created On: 2000

This is one the sites which proves the fact you don’t have to look Web 2.0 to be community site. You don’t even need to add your logo on the website . It has a very interesting story worth a read

Tags: hyves, myHeritage, bahu, Fotolog, HospitalityClub, multilingual, social network

ReadWriteWeb has a fantastic blog about the social networks in the far east. I wrote a similar blog about social networking globally.

Given Facebook is popular in US/UK (and Africa) it still has a lot of catching up to do when you compare it will QQ.com’s 300m users. Another interesting figure is Facebook’s position amongst other web properties, according to Alexa:

Although China’s Facebook aka QQ.com is number two in popularity in world’s oldest continuous civilization. The general reaction towards Facebook is getting fairly negative. Personally the statistics matter less than what my non-geek colleagues are saying about FB: “Boring..nothing exciting”, “I have 121 friend requests”, “I have pending messages”… not really optimistic!

Compared to the beginning of last year Facebook has seen 41.8% rise in attention but is now losing it at 3.8%. I would be interested to see steps FB is taking to turn things around.

Tags: Compete.com, Facebook.com, QQ.com

Alex the good man just sent me this link in French. Check out the market share of Facebook globally. In Asia it doesn’t have any market share. The Asian market is the biggest in terms of size of internet users but not in terms of social networkers. Orkut is big in Asia and Latin America.

 Although Facebook is the most popular social network in Africa. Clearly Social networking has not hit Africa as it has in North America

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Tags: SocialNetworking, Asia, Africa, North America

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to go to borders and this magazine caught my attention:

A magazine that allows you to learn how to use facebook on the web, mobile etc. The magazines gives you links to celebrity profiles on Facebook. How Cool NOT!

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Tags: Facebook, Borders

Today BBC has an article about Facebook’s declining users.

Users fell 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, according to data from Nielsen Online.

Rightly it doesn’t mean its the end of Facebook, its just a slump in 3 big social networks: Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. What I’m more interested is in what Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online had to say:

“However, real growth potential lies in the niche networks - those based on a particular lifestyle or interest, such as travel, music, wealth or business”

Smaller social networks like Windows Live Space, BBC Communities and Friend Reunited saw a rise in Jan 2008.

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Tags: Socialnetwork, Niche Networks, Facebook

Later today Comscore will announce stats regarding popularity of Social Networks. One notable statistic was:

There is a lot of talk about how Facebook Applications have been annoying its users. There is some more compelling figures which suggest:

I’m sure Microsoft will not be pleased given that Facebook is not making a lot of Money.

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Tags: Facebook, Myspace, Revenue

So Facebook recently (25th Jan 2008) allowed its application developers to include apps to their website.

What does that mean ?

I’ll try and explain this using a simple example. I once built a light weight facebook application called 2wentysbook. Now I can add that to my Facebook profile or my website

Using Facebook’s latest Javascript library I can run all the Ajax Fb applications on my site. Excellent news except, I have to run the application on my website as an iFrame.

iFrame is an HTML element which makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document.

So what’s wrong with that ?

iFrame is a big no no from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point of view. Content within an iframe is not part of that url (mysite.com), it is part of another url (facebook.com). And so a search engine will not be looking at the content of the iframe as an “on-page factor” for the parent url that holds an iframe.

So if my plan was to put the application on my site and get it indexed by search engine spiders, unfortunately it wouldn’t do my website any good.

All the user information example: real name, contact details etc are anyway not shared with me. So why should I add Facebook application to mysite ?

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Tags: Facebook, iFrame, Javascript Library

Earlier I covered how there are 2 Facebook Chat clients: Social.im and FriendVox. Social.im is a PC (now available on a Mac too) application where users can chat to all their Facebook friends.

I came across another Facebook chat called Imo.im. The difference here is that IMO allows text and video chat, further users can log into their AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo. Worth looking at it.

Add it to your Facebook application.

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Tags: Facebook, Chat, AIM, Google Talk, MSN

Earlier I blogged how social.im built a facebook chat which required users to download software. Today I discovered a Facebook chat which uses Ajax and is completely browser based.

FriendVox.com developed by London based Techlightenment, specializing in Facebook applications. These are the guys who built the Bob Dylan Application, Socialistics

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Tags: FriendVox.com, Techlightenment, social.im, Facebook Chat

Paypal has added an application it calls the badge, which allows friends on your facebook profile to pay you cash. Paypal claims that its a great way to raise money (donation) and pay you back.

I can see how it can be an awesome application to raise money for charity. Not sure if its as useful as paypal claims for asking mates to pay you back:

Paypal: “It can be a drag asking for money back from your mates. You drop the odd comment or two and then it just becomes embarrassing if they don’t get the hint”.

Its brand new application and is still in its infancy stage:

Update: The application is now online and available on Facebook

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Tags: Paypal, Facebook, Badge, Charity