Malaysians are pretty familiar with Friendster, Facebook, MySpace. Generally, teens hang out in Friendster, colleague students and working adults in Facebook, Malays in MySpace.

But, I am not sure whether many heard of our very own local providers:

• FriendX, EKawan, Emeimei by Nextnation, targeting English / Malay / Chinese crowds. It is not easy to target our multi-racial crowds with one shot. That is the reason behind three differentiated services (similar features though). Hold on, where is the Indian spice?
• Mypal by Lelong, as I mentioned before. Leverages on their huge base of existing members on Lelong.
• MalaysiaMaya, another newly launched site with tons of features. The overall web design and usability is not pleasing though.
• Circles99, YouKawan, Kawanster, these are smaller players around.

All the services mentioned above are sort of generic or horizontal Social Network Service (SNS). In next episode, we are going to explore into vertical SNS.