Social Networking in Non-English Speaking Countries
I spoke to an Asian friend recently regarding social networking in the Asian region and I am pretty surprised that places like China where internet is being censored and freedom of speech is unheard of, there are approximately 220 million just on the QQ’s network. These statistics are for early 2008. TechCruch also reported that there were 376 million QQ users as of April 2009 and just over a year it grew about 70%.
In Korea, with a population of approximately 47 million people, Cyworld, a Korean based social networking site has 22million registered users. This is quite a shocking number of people. In Japan, its a similar case too.
Even though the penetration rates are not as high as Western countries, the dynamics of using social networking in each culture and sub groups can be quite different. For example, mobile phone usage is much higher in Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Singapore and I suspect that there will be more users that would be accessing social networking sites via their mobiles. This changes the way people use such tools for communication. Also in these countries, wireless broadband speeds (3G or free wifi in most parts of the city) are extremely high and streaming videos into mobile devices is a common thing.
I am sure we can learn alot from these countries just by understanding the infrastructure differences, cultural differences and tools differences.
Yuri Alkin said,
Poeple are people everywhere
We’re social creatures, and so in any society technologies that connect people together eventually get adopted. At the same time diffence of cultures also get reflected in these technologies, so it’s not surpising that there’s no single social network (at least not yet). For example, LiveJurnal which is the most popular social networking system in Russia took of that well over there since it fits well Russian culture.
Sean Lew said,
Hi Yuri, I absolutely agree with you. Its interesting that there are so many social networking startups around and not even facebook managed to be the dominant social networking site across the world.
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