Previously, I spoke about Facebook superseding Friendster in Asia, or more precisely Southeast Asia. However, Facebook is facing bigger challenges to beat or even catch up with its competitors in other parts of Asia, especially China, Japan and South Korea.



The map above is an interesting visualization by Vincenzo Cosenza built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009.

How fast things change, Facebook seems to be no.1 in Malaysia already since I last posted 5 months ago (while Friendster was still leading).

Proof? Alexa. Facebook has moved up from no.8 to no.5, whereas Friendster has dropped from top 3 to no.7.

However, Friendster is still leading in terms of web searches. This is probably contributed by heavy searches such as "Friendster layouts" for teens who like to decorate their mini-hompy (pardon my Korean slang here).

Facebook has just released its official statistics, selected facts as below:

More than 140 million active users
The fastest growing demographic is 25 years old and older
Average user has 100 friends on the site
More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the US

How many out of the 140 million users are Malaysians, and what about the demographics? AllFacebook does provide an useful estimation tool for us to delve into the figures.

Friendster is still no.1 social network in Malaysia, in almost every aspects. MySpace used to be no.2 in Malaysia but has since been overtook by Facebook in 2008.

comScore (source)
Measurement: Unique visitors from Malaysia, in May 2008.

1. Friendster (3,024,000 unique visitors)
2. Facebook (758,000)
3. MySpace (735,000)

Observation: Friendster is at least 4 times bigger than Facebook or MySpace!

Remember Sun Java's tag line "Write once, run anywhere"? Google has introduced similar concept to their social platform, OpenSocial. Developers write social application on top of the social platform, which is hosted on major social network sites.

(Image Source)

Which social network sites contain OpenSocial? Click here for an impressive list of OpenSocial SNS containers.

If we are talking the big three in Malaysia, Friendster and Myspace are in the picture. On another hand, you are forced into the walled garden of Facebook, which also fancies PHP-oriented developers. OpenSocial only requires developers to be equipped with XML, HTML and JavaScript.

Japan



While Mixi is the leader in PC SNS, Mobage Town is Japan's no.1 Mobile SNS. Mobage Town is a huge success in mobile-oriented Japan which enables community-driven activities via mobile. Their "killer-app" is the wide range of free games which build up the initial user base.

Rolled out in February 2006, around 9 (or 11) million subscribers.

Green Packet is definitely hot in the news nowadays thanks to its WIMAX roll out in the country through Packet One. They are also having an eye on the content business through the launch of the social network site, Ruumz. Quite an exotic name by Malaysia's standard huh?



After so much rumours among the industry insiders, it is finally making its debut although it is still in beta currently. You can only join by invitation at the moment.

As the conclusion of this series, dare I say that we still do not have a very successful local (generic or vertical) SNS at this moment. But we do have decent special purpose SNS, like Blinklist, Nuffnang and Adverlets, as posted here.

Here, I would like to summarize three key success criteria of SNS:

• Marketing strategies - viral marketing, SEO and various online and offline marketing.
• Elegance of the service - localized, "killer app" to encourage return visits, first to market etc.
• MONETIZATION - advertisements, affiliate programs, subscription, revenue-share on mobile service etc.

Although Malaysia's netizens are very used to bulletin board based service, but I am not going to include those here as they are not "full-fledged" SNS services and also there are too many around.

What is "full-fledged" SNS? In my definition, there are 2 criteria:

• Encourage interactiveness between members.
• User generated content - blog, photo, video etc.

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:

China has one, Germany has one, but not without controversies...

Here comes our very own clone, MyPal:

Not exactly an identical clone. Obvious thing missing is the application platform, which is mainly the success criteria of Facebook. I am not sure what is Lelong's intention on launching this recently (July '08), without any sort of interactivity between this clone and its famous online auction site.

Malaysia's netizens are used to Western (English) web services because there is no language barrier. May be this explains why there is not much local player in our internet scene. Well, that is a hopeful thought at least. Nevertheless, I am going to list down Malaysia's equivalents (or wannabes) of international web services.

As of July 2008, following are the top (most visited) sites in Malaysia, courtesy of Alexa:

1. Yahoo
2. Google.com.my
3. Friendster
4. YouTube
5. Google
6. Blogger.com
7. Windows Live
8. Facebook
9. Microsoft Network (MSN)
10. Myspace

Sense something there? Yeah, 5 out of top 10 sites in Malaysia are social network service provider. It is definitely hitting Malaysia hard, the rise of mass social media.