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

Yesterday Myspace announced a deal with 49 state attorneys general and Washington D.C. to protect minors from sexual predators. The deal :

• Allow parents to submit a child’s email addresses to MySpace to prevent anyone from misusing the addresses to set up profiles.
• Make the default setting “private” for 16- and 17-year-old users so they cannot be viewed by adults they don’t already know.
• Respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content and devote more staff and resources to classify photographs and discussion groups.
• Strengthen software against underage users.
• Create a high school section for users under 18 years old.

You would expect such a deal to be in place much earlier. Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and Orkut still don’t have such measures in place. As I understand Facebook and Bebo only look at multimedia which are reported by users. Although Facebook claims that complaints are a very effective way of working with such problems.

I like Myspace’s dedication to make a difference, read this on Techcrunch:

“MySpace helped develop and fund a database of registered sex offenders and deletes the accounts of members who are registered sex offenders.”

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Tags: MySpace, Sexual Predators, Facebook, Bebo,

Bebo, UK based social network primarily used by younger audience was named the safest and most user friendly social networking site. Leaving rival Facebook and MySpace behind.

The polls were conducted by Computing Which ? magazine. The company praised Bebo for the level of security and safety provided on the site.

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Tags: Bebo, secure, safe, computing which ?

If you are a Myspace user you should have used (or atleast heard of) photobucket like several times. Photobucket allows users to upload their pictures and videos. Users can then embed them into their myspace profile using the code.

Myspace bought photobucket in May 2007 for £150M. Finally they decided to integrate it into myspace. A nice logical step for Myspace. Considering the usage of Photobucket! Photobucket has continuously be growing as a site and now has 56M registered users. This integration implies that users don’t have enter any HTML code to include a picture.

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Tags: Myspace, Photobucket, integration, 56M

Pew Internet which produces reports that explore impact of internet on families and communities have just released some not so shocking facts about American teenagers. Atleast in my opinion I expected such results.

• According to the report 93% of teens use the internet. 64% of teens between 12-17 have participated in UGC activities.
• 55% of 12-17 year olds have Facebook or MySpace.
• 47% teens have uploaded photos
• 14% post online videos

This is more like news to me:

• Blogosphere: Girls lead the way in blogging with 35% teen girls blogging as oppose to 20% of teen boys. Quote: “Younger girl bloggers have grown at such a fast clip that they are now outspaceing even older boys”
• Boys post more videos on sites like YouTube. Report suggest that 19% of teen boys post videos as oppose to 10% teen girls.
• Awesome stats for someone looking to build social network for teenagers:

See how popular instant messenger is? Clearly teens prefer chatting on IM as oppose to social networking. I’m sure this phenomenon will change with the popularity of social networks. From listening to certain experts in the area I understand that teenagers are slow adopters but very trendy. As in, when social networking is in fashion (amongst teenagers), it should spread like wild fire.

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Tags: Americanteenagers stats UGC Social Network