The global reach of social networks

October 21, 2011 11:13 AM

Social network popularity around the world in 2011 as determined by Google search statistics.

Summary and links to individual statistics:

• Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
• Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
• LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
• Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
• Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
• FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
• MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
• LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
• Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
• Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
• Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.

posted by OverlappingElvis (22 comments total)

1) Apparently G+ is going to start allowing for nyms, finally (that was the main reason I left - still not fully sold on it, feels too cluttered to me, but this is progress)

2) Call me when we get this gorgeous Superflat social network., world of "Oz" from the anime Summer Wars. This is some sweet shit.
posted by symbioid at 11:16 AM on October 21, 2011

It's a wonder "popular in Burma" isn't already synonymous with "dead to the world."
posted by psoas at 11:18 AM on October 21, 2011

The map for LinkedIn is really neat and would correspond, I imagine, pretty closely with a map of the density of "English-speaking white-collar workers" or something similar.
posted by Phire at 11:20 AM on October 21, 2011

Because in the US, unless it has a Kardishian or Lohan hashtag, it's not news.
posted by stormpooper at 11:22 AM on October 21, 2011

Man, whatever happened to Friendster? They're not even in the running anymore.
posted by crapmatic at 11:23 AM on October 21, 2011

as determined by Google search statistics
which is to say, not traffic? user-engagement?
posted by Prince_of_Cups at 11:32 AM on October 21, 2011

Myspace! Hahaha....oh I miss you 1999.
posted by Fizz at 11:35 AM on October 21, 2011

Man, whatever happened to Friendster? They're not even in the running anymore.

Bought by a Malaysian company, shut down and restarted as a casual game portal.
posted by murphy slaw at 11:36 AM on October 21, 2011

Whoa, my takeaway is that Brazilians love all sorts of social networking.
posted by This_Will_Be_Good at 11:39 AM on October 21, 2011

There are a ton of SNSs not listed here that are huge - Mixi, RenRen, vKontake, Odnoklassinki...

Basically this post is: how many non-Americans use popular American websites?
posted by k8t at 11:50 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Tuenti is almost exclusively Spanish.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:53 AM on October 21, 2011

Fizz: "Myspace! Hahaha....oh I miss you 1999."

MySpace didn't launch until '03
posted by octothorpe at 11:53 AM on October 21, 2011 [2 favorites]

octothorpe: "Fizz: "Myspace! Hahaha....oh I miss you 1999."

MySpace didn't launch until '03"

I think that was a reference to the site design?
posted by symbioid at 11:56 AM on October 21, 2011

This measures the popularity of facebook (or any of these other sites) by counting the number of times people enter "facebook" into google's search box, right?

That seems deeply flawed. What about all the people who have set facebook as their homepage, or are using facebook apps on their phones, or people who just plain bookmarked it, or type "facebook.com" into the URL bar of their browser?


s/facebook/any other of these networks/g
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 11:58 AM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

I wish they had used a better map.
posted by mareli at 12:16 PM on October 21, 2011

That pseudonyms on google thing is dubious. Why in hell would it take you "over the next several months" to roll that out? Just stop vetting signups for real ID. Take any competent programmer 2 minutes to info out the lines of code requiring the vets.

They are trying to figure out some finesse to silence the critics and keep their ad revenue maximized.

FAIL.
posted by bukvich at 12:44 PM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

Two innernets says they'll still vet your name, but will allow you to choose what's displayed to people who aren't Google.
posted by LogicalDash at 1:26 PM on October 21, 2011

There are a ton of SNSs not listed here that are huge - Mixi, RenRen, vKontake, Odnoklassinki...

The article says:

we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.

posted by John Cohen at 1:26 PM on October 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

I want to see numbers.

If Bebo is most popular in the British Isles, I want to see the numbers of the country next in the list that isn't one of them. I bet it's not just a Zipf distribution, it's a few orders of magnitude more of a drop-off than that.
posted by yellowcandy at 7:59 PM on October 21, 2011

I believe it's Weibo (Twitter-a-like) and RenRen here in China, but someone who actually knows should chip in. Obviously, the Internet with Chinese characteristics gives domestic platforms a serious edge.
posted by Abiezer at 8:39 PM on October 21, 2011

Myspace always felt like something very 90s to me. It could be the site design. Or the types of people that I encountered on that network.
posted by Fizz at 5:38 AM on October 22, 2011

Take any competent programmer 2 minutes to info out the lines of code requiring the vets.

That's not how software releases to 100,000,000 users are done. It's more like:

1) A release schedule is determined three months ahead of time.
2) list of features/bugfixes feasible to accomplish in that release is added to that schedule and assigned to programmers.
3) A programmer gets the assigned task and makes the 2-minute fix.
4) The programmer then spends the rest of the day writing a set of tests to verify that the 2-minute fix works as intended.
5) Everyone does the rest of their programming assignments for this release, which takes several weeks.
6) Everything is marked completed and the whole thing is passed off to QA who run all the tests that everyone thought of earlier, which takes another week. They find at least one thing wrong and pass it back to the programmers to fix again.
7) Two days later it gets sent back to QA to re-run the tests.
8) Now it gets passed to operations who roll it out to 1% of users for a few days to make sure it doesn't fail catastrophically. When they're fairly confident it's working OK, they roll it out 5%, then 10%, then 25% then 100% of users.

Total elapsed time: 3 months.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 2:23 PM on October 22, 2011 [1 favorite]