Facebook rules the social networking world
Jinfo Blog

23rd December 2009

By Penny Crossland

Item

Facebook’s dominance in the social networking sector (see Nancy Davis Kho’s posting at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24420) is almost a given. From an information professional’s point of view, news on Facebook and its activities is worth monitoring, since the site is increasingly being used for business purposes (see Diana Nutting’s posting http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22921). The Facebook corporate site (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) reminds us that not only are there more than 350 million users of the site worldwide, but that more than 700,000 businesses have active pages on the site. This makes Facebook a networking site to watch for business information purposes. Techcrunch reminded us this week of the site’s global dominance by referring to an Italian blogger (http://digbig.com/5bawce) who has put together an interesting, interactive map showing the most popular social networking sites. This map shows clearly how Facebook is used in most parts of the globe, even overtaking Orkut (http://orkut.com) in India, which had been showing a promising start there. Orkut still dominatesin Brazil, though. There are some Facebook-resistant countries: according to the map, networking site Vkontakte (http://vkontakte.ru) clearly rules in Russia. However, as Techcrunch points out, Vkontakte is owned by Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies, which recently took a 5% stake in Facebook. It is easy to see how Facebook could take over at some point here, too. China, too has resisted the Facebook mania. Here QQ (http://www.qq.com) is the leading social media site. Since the number of online users is expected to double in China to reach 840 million by 2013, Facebook will most likely try to enter this market soon. Another notable networking site is San Francisco-based Hi5 (http://hi5.com), which has pockets of users in Peru, Romania, Thailand, Portugal and Mongolia. By the look of things, probably not for much longer....

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