Over at the Radar blog one the analysts, Ben Lorica has analyzed Facebook usage across the world – showing that the fastest adopters in the past four weeks were from the South America, Central America and the Carribean. Throughout Asia, (which would be better viewed if it was further broken down into a few more sub-Asian regions rather than one large chunk) the growth was in the double digits – ~12% – yet as Ben points out, its from a rather small base of users. Another post on Techcrunch looks at the reasons the Japanese continue to reject Myspace and Faceboook, flocking instead to their much adored Mixi. Aside from the cultural differences, what was interesting was the length of time it took for both MySpace and Facebook to set-up offices in Japan.
Other reasons highlight the one-size fits all/what works in US must work overseas approach used by both MySpace & Facebook when first introducing their services, slow pace of developing identical mobile versions of MySpace & Facebook (shockingly, given the mobile phone craze culture in Japan). Another reasons Mixi dominates the market is because of its preference as a tool for
communicating at a distance through diaries and communities to meet like-minded members. It doesn’t primarily exist to make new friends (poking is restricted) or as a platform for public self-presentation.
With redesigns and increasing amount of apps and the migration from being a tool to poke and add friends to your list to one that has video/photo/note-blogging functions in one site it seems that Facebook is trying to position itself as a one-stop shop for social networking. However, its weird how long its taking to accommodate mobile phone users and the lack of taking cultural boundaries into consideration when carrying out their strategy (Google also ran into the same problem in regards to culture and thinking what works in one place will work elsewhere).
