I was going to comment on this later in the week, but this infographic from TR really did it better than I could. Looking at how social networking is not isolated to any one point on the globe (after all, we are all social creatures), there are different systems that dominate. A friend of mine introduced me to Okurt many years ago, but I never really saw the point, but him, being from Brazil, where Okurt is huge, knew it very well.
People who want to break into entertainment seem to be using MySpace as their preferred platform (like my nephew) around the world and generally North Atlantic teens are still big on it. Facebook is booming in North America and is pretty strong in the UK as well where Skyrock is seemingly dominant. Netlog is doing very well in Africa and it has the really cool feature of automatically converting language based on user location (so from Canada, it’s detecting English and French). Asia, in addition to some level of Facebook, there is also Friendster and Mixi (the site is in Japanese, so here is the Wikipedia link).
So with all these systems, harking back to the days of the old Compuserve and AOL networks (my old post) that were closed, what about being able to move your data to a new system should you and your family have to move between, say between Canada and Australia? It seems that right now, that is not going to be something that is going to be very easy (look at Searchblog), unless the plans that Facebook has (Seachblog again) to open up to other networks comes to fruition. But in the mean time, what to do?
Well, to me it seems that there is a simple answer. Use the site that you want to be a part of as a collector and actually store your content in neutral areas. Of course, many of the people who are drawn to social networking sites don’t bother with other sites because they just want something that is easy. But as a matter of best practice, you might want to think about storing images in Flickr or Picasa Web or on your own site, so that if you ever have to move between platforms, even if you never have to move between countries, you can by simply updating links. This also brings up an interesting feature that any startup network would need – a profile importer, so that if you don’t have data stored externally, things can move over. Facebook has this in the basic form of an address book import, but it’s a first gen system, the next gen will need to be able to do much more. And now that Facebook allows for apps, there might be a way for an app to do this.
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