Social Networks - A Localized Global Phenomenon

Facebook, and social networks in particular, are a medium to “Simply be you, online!”. It is essentially different from everything that is on the web because it brings a flow of real people with real identities and real interaction with their friends, families, fans, followers and future contacts.

When the web burst into the scenes with Netscape in 95, there was a famous saying “On the Internet you do not know if you are a dog” because it was new to create web sites for dogs and cats. But on social networks, I don’t think people create pages for their pets, instead they create real pages for themselves and brag about their pets.

We have looked at cumulative stats of market share of various social networks worldwide. So, we all agree it is a global phenomenon. But each of us are on one social network predominantly and are on couple more networks which we think are much smaller.

Valleywag got a world map of social networks in different acountries from Alexa (picture below, credits: valleywag.com)

 Why is this so? I am primarily on facebook, have accounts on Orkut and Myspace with overlapping social graph, but there are some relations which are never going to leave one network to another to be with me because the majority of their real social graphs are on that network.

The reason Facebook is my primary network is because it brings my real social network from real life onto facebook.  

This is a natural reason that will bring the entire world with all its diversity into diverse set of networks and hopefully provide creativity for new technologies to bridge across various networks according to the user’s choice.

Here is an interesting grouping of social networks marketshare per continent worldwide (source:lemonde.fr)