This great graphic illustrates that, for all that we’ve become a global economy, the world is flat, and so on, there are still very marked differences across the world in the proliferation of social networking, and in the specific platforms which have caught on in different parts of the world.
Google’s Orkut has famously been very popular in Brazil, but it’s interesting to note that Facebook, which is second to MySpace in the US, is ahead of it just across the border in Canada. Factors such as early adoption, language options, tie-in to other products and so on all have an impact, but the result is this huge fragmentation. Given the massive network effects that accrue to a provider once they become big, it’s hard to imagine any single provider ever becoming dominant across large swathes of the world.
