However, its quarterly growth has been sliding steadily in 2011, from 17% in Quarter 1 to 8% in Quarter 4. In Quarter 4 2010, it was growing at 21%.

2010 was the year when Facebook went on hyper-drive growth on users acquisition front in Asia. However, 2011 was the year when Facebook downshifted a gear or two. The decline is expected to continue as many Asian nations are reaching saturation level.

Total Facebook users in Asia increased from 168 million on October 1 2011 to 181 million on December 31 2011, a quarterly growth rate of 8%.

Indonesia continues to be the top Asian country on Facebook with 42 million users. But India will dethrone Indonesia soon. [UPDATE: India has surpassed Indonesia to become Facebook's biggest country in Asia.]

Facebook users in India has been growing by the double digits throughout 2011. On January 1 2011, India has 17 million Facebook users. By the end of the year, the country has 41 million users!

Other than India, eight other countries registered double digits growth throughout 2011, namely Thailand, Japan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Laos (see Table 3). However, only three countries are growing at rates higher in Quarter 4 compared to Quarter 3, namely Japan, South Korea and Mongolia. And South Korea registered the highest single quarter growth of 82% in Quarter 1 2011.

How accurate are these estimations? Read here.

Facebook in Asia: A Growth Story (2011) originally appeared on GreyReview.com on January 1, 2012.

Facebook now has over 800 million users worldwide, with 168 million are from Asia. In Quarter 3 this year, Facebook added 16.8 million new users in Asia (compared to 19.5 million in Quarter 2 2011). So far this year, the social network has added some 56 million new users; it started the year with 111 million Asian users. Its latest quarter-on-quarter growth rate is 11%. However, the rate has been somewhat slowing since end of 2010 – from 24% in Quarter 4 2010 to 17% Q1’11 to 15% Q2’11 to 11% Q3’11.

1. 57% of Facebook users in Asia can be found in the Southeast Asia region.
2. Internet users in India continue to embrace Facebook. As of end of Quarter 3 this year, India has a total of 36.4 million Facebook users, which is 4 million less than Indonesia. India will very soon surpass Indonesia to become the top Facebook country in Asia (and third-largest in the world).
3. Thailand surpassed Malaysia to become the 4th largest Facebook nation in Asia.
4. Users growth in Malaysia continues to stuck at single-digit. And Taiwan is challenging Malaysia for No. 5 in the list.
5. Facebook users in Japan continue to show impressive growth rate at 26%. In Quarter 2, users population grew by 33%. On January 01 this year, there were 1.8 million Facebook users in Japan. By the end of Quarter 3, total users jumped to 4.8 million.
6. Vietnamese Facebook users grew by 51% in Quarter 3 2011 and will soon replace Singapore in 11th rank.

How accurate are these estimations? Read here.

Facebook in Asia: Latest Stats on Total Users by Country [Quarter 3 2011] originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 1, 2011.

Plurk is still popular in Asia (especially East Asia). According to co-founder Woon, Plurk is now one of the high-traffic social networks in Asia. It has over 6 million registered users and the majority of them are from Asia – - Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Japan. Plurk, which runs predominantly on a Python, JavaScript and MySQL stack, has over 400,000 active users daily and 200,000 concurrent users at any give time of a day). These users generated millions of plurks each day.

Growth of Plurks and Active Users

Google Trend for Plurk: Daily Unique Visitors, 2009 – 2011

Early this year, Plurk Labs opened its first Asian office in Taipei, Taiwan (Plurk’s other offices – Toronto, Canada and Warsaw, Poland). Currently, the company has 12 staff. Six of them are working in the new Taipei office and the others in Europe and North America. Currently, the company is actively looking to hire more developers “to solve big and challenging scaling problem in Plurk” (apply here). In coming months, Plurk plans to introduce location-based and content discovery features. Plurk app for iOS and Android also in the pipeline.

In today’s Facebook-Twitter duopoly, niche sites like Plurk can still compete by offering exciting social networking experience.

Plurk Interface

I wonder what’s up with Plurk (yeah, that microblogging site with a timeline) originally appeared on GreyReview.com on March 30, 2011.

• 1930: The Notificator.
• January 1978: Computer Bulletin Board System.
• 1989: World Wide Web invented.
• 1989: Online gaming service Quantum Link changed name to America Online.
• 2003: The launch of Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn.
• 2004: “The Facebook” was launched.
• 2006: Twitter launched.
• 2008: Burger King viral video.
• 2010: First tweet from space.

The illustrations missed to mention the birth of an early social network SixDegrees, social news, and location-based social networking, just to name a few. What are some of the other milestones you think deserve mention?

The Illustrated Brief History (sort-of) of Social Networking originally appeared on GreyReview.com on March 23, 2011.

A continuously updated list of most popular Malaysian Facebook Pages, ranked by total Likes:

Most Popular Facebook Pages in Malaysia

Rank	Facebook Pages	Company	Total Likes
1	Upin & Ipin hit children animation series	Les' Copaque Production Sdn Bhd
2	Maaduu free to watch Korean dramas and pop videos	PlayTV Asia Sdn Bhd
3	AirAsia Southeast Asia's largest no-frills carrier	AirAsia Bhd
4	McDonald's Malaysia fast-food restaurant chain	Golden Arches Restaurants Sdn Bhd
5	Hot FM popular Malay radio station	Media Prima Bhd
6	iluvislam.com Islamic media site	ILI dot com
7	TV3 leading free-to-air TV station in Malaysia	Media Prima Bhd
8	Golden Screen Cinemas Malaysia's leading cinema chain	Golden Screen Cinemas Sdn Bhd
9	Pizza Hut Malaysia pizza restaurant chain	Pizza Hut Restaurants Sdn Bhd
10	Berita Harian Online Bahasa Malaysia daily newspaper	Berita Harian Sdn Bhd
11	MOLPoints virtual currency to buy Facebook Credits and more	MOLPoints AccessPortal Sdn Bhd
12	Sharing media site for youth	Web Idea
13	Malaysia Airlines Malaysian national carrier	Malaysian Airline System Bhd
14	CIMB Malaysia 2nd largest commercial bank in Malaysia	CIMB Bank Bhd
15	Mudah.my online marketplace	Mudah.my Sdn Bhd
16	Imam Muda reality TV format with Islamic teachings	Astro Entertainment Sdn Bhd
17	Oh! Media web and advertising company	Oh! Media Network
18	Harian Metro first afternoon Bahasa Malaysia newspaper	Harian Metro Sdn Bhd
19	BlackBerry Malaysia popular smartphone in Malaysia	Research In Motion
20	DiGi Youths youth community curated by DiGi	DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd
21	Remaja teen magazine	Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd
22	Maxis leading mobile services provider	Maxis Bhd
23	DiGi Telecommunications Malaysia's 3rd largest cellular network provider	DiGi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd
24	Nike Football Malaysia leading sportswear company	Nike Sales (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
25	Kit Kat Malaysia chocolate-coated wafer confection	Nestle (Malaysia) Bhd
26	Astro satellite TV service provider	MEASAT Broadcast Network Systems Sdn Bhd
27	Super Dancer Online Extreme online game	CiB Net Station Sdn Bhd
28	Gempak Starz Malay-language info-comics magazine provider	Gempak Starz Sdn Bhd
29	KFC Malaysia fast food restaurant chain	KFC Holdings (Malaysia) Bhd
30	Hotlink cellular prepaid service	Maxis Bhd
31	Hitz.fm English radio station	Airtime Management and Programming Sdn Bhd
32	Big Apple Donuts & Coffee local doughnuts chain	Big Apple Interasia Sdn Bhd
33	United International Pictures Malaysia leading film distribution company	United International Pictures Sdn Bhd
34	BeautieQQ Fashion women fashions online store	BeautieQQ Fashion Sdn Bhd
35	Sony Ericsson Malaysia mobile phone maker	Sony Ericsson Sdn Bhd
36	Canon Camera (Malaysia) leading camera brand in Malaysia	Canon Marketing (M) Sdn Bhd
37	Majalah Solusi Islamic magazine	Telaga Biru Sdn Bhd
38	HarakahDaily political newspaper	Telesign Communications Sdn Bhd
39	Pa&Ma parenting magazine	Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd
40	Watsons Malaysia health and beauty store chain	Watsons Personal Care Stores (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
41	Firefly Airlines budget carrier by MAS	FireFly Sdn Bhd
42	UFun video contents sharing Page	Shine Cloud Studio
43	Padini Holdings largest fashion retailer in Malaysia	Padini Holdings Bhd
44	BoBoiBoy Malaysian animation series on Disney Channel SEA	Animonsta Studios Sdn Bhd
45	Home Ideas wall stickers online store	San De Bayu Sdn Bhd
46	Everyone Connects broadband lifestyle community by TM	Telekom Malaysia Bhd
47	Mingguan Wanita magazine for women	Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd
48	Adidas Malaysia sportswear brand	adidas Malaysia Sdn Bhd
49	Sunway Pyramid shopping mall	Sunway Pyramid Sdn Bhd
50	Babymanja Fans Club online & retail baby store	Manjaku Sdn Bhd
51	Avalon sarees online store	Avalon Sarees
52	AXE Malaysia male grooming brand	Unilever (M) Holdings Sdn Bhd
53	7-Eleven Malaysia convenience store	7-Eleven Malaysia Sdn Bhd
54	Mobile9 portal to share, download mobile contents	Mobile9.com
55	Nestle Drumstick ice cream	Nestle Products Sdn Bhd
56	Xpax mobile prepaid service	Celcom Axiata Bhd
57	Sushi King sushi restaurant chain	Sushi King Sdn Bhd
58	PetsMore.com Malaysia largest pets store chain	Pets More Sdn Bhd
59	U.O.X. mobile prepaid plan for youth, 18 to 25 years of age	Celcom Axiata Bhd
60	IKEA Malaysia international home products company	IKEA Malaysia
61	KongSi action Bahasa Malaysia movie	Metrowealth Pictures Sdn Bhd
62	Murai entertainment news portal	Digital Five Sdn Bhd
63	MMOG.asia online game publisher	MyCNX (M) Holdings Sdn Bhd
64	GAP Malaysia clothing retailer	GAP Malaysia
65	Zouk Club KL entertainment outlet	Zouk Club Sdn Bhd
66	Revive isotonic drink	Permanis Sdn Bhd
67	Sony Malaysia consumer electronics	Sony (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
68	Guinness Malaysia popular Irish dry stout	Guinness Anchor Bhd
69	Lelong.my leading auction site	Interbase Resources Sdn Bhd
70	S.O.X. mobile prepaid plan for youth, 12 to 18 years of age	Celcom Axiata Bhd
71	TM Rewards customer loyalty programme	Telekom Malaysia Bhd
72	Machines Apple reseller	Machines Sdn Bhd
73	Action City toy store chain	Big Box International Sdn Bhd
74	Racing Boy motorcycles accessories brand	Meng Kah Auto Parts Trading Sdn Bhd
75	Milo Fuze popular chocolate and malt drink	Nestle (Malaysia) Bhd
76	Funtora deals site	Atom Media Sdn Bhd
77	Twisties Malaysia snack food product	Kraft Malaysia Sdn Bhd
78	Pavilion KL shopping mall in Bukit Bintang area	Urusharta Cemerlang Sdn Bhd
79	Maggi Malaysia instant noodles	Nestle Malaysia Bhd
80	Sinar Harian Malay-language newspaper	Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd
81	Resorts World Genting casinos operator	Resorts World Bhd
82	15Malaysia socio-political short films	Pete Teo / Packet One Networks (M) Sdn Bhd
83	MHI TV3 Malay-language morning talk show	Media Prima Bhd
84	Secret Recipe Malaysia lifestyle cafe chain, popular for its cheese cakes	Secret Recipe Cakes & Cafe Sdn Bhd
85	Puma Malaysia sportswear	PUMA Sports Goods Sdn Bhd
86	Awan Dania TV drama series	Nusantara Seni Karya Sdn Bhd
87	SilkyTrend online store for women apparels	SilkyTrend Enterprise
88	100PLUS Outdo Yourself isotonic drink	Fraser & Neave Holdings Bhd
89	Hard Rock Hotel Penang a luxury resort in Penang Island	HPL Hotels & Resorts
90	Pantene Malaysia shampoo brand	Procter & Gamble (M) Sdn Bhd
91	Hennessy Malaysia cognac maker	Moet Hennessy Diageo Malaysia Sdn. Bhd.
92	MyNewsHub Malay-language online news portal	Mynewsnet Sdn Bhd
93	NissanMalaysia automobile	Tan Chong Motor Holdings Berhad
94	Maybank Malaysia's largest bank	Malayan Banking Bhd
95	Sunsilk Malaysia shampoo brand	Unilever Holdings (M) Sdn Bhd
96	CornettoLove Wall's ice cream	Unilever (M) Sdn Bhd
97	AirAsiaGo online travel portal by AirAsia	AirAsia Bhd
98	Tune Talk mobile service provider	Tune Talk Sdn Bhd
99	Johnnie Walker Malaysia popular scotch whiskey brand	Moet Hennessy Diageo Malaysia Sdn. Bhd.
100	Lollytot baby and children online gift store	Lollytot
101	Intel Malaysia world's leading chipmaker	Intel Electronics (M) Sdn Bhd
102	Nokia Malaysia mobile phones supplier	Nokia (M) Sdn Bhd
103	F.O.S clothing retail chain	F.O.S Clothing Co Sdn Bhd
104	Lipice Malaysia lip care products	Rohto-Mentholatum (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
105	Avon Malaysia beauty products	Avon Cosmetics (M) Sdn Bhd
106	Friends of MyEG Malaysia's e-government service provider	MyEG Services Bhd
107	OHBULAN! entertainment news	Driven Media Sdn Bhd
108	Silkygirl cosmetics	Alliance Cosmetics Sdn Bhd
109	Lancome Malaysia cosmetics brand	L'Oreal Malaysia Sdn Bhd
110	Generasi Hebat youth community by BRAND'S essence of chicken	Cerebos (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
111	Lumix Club Lumix camera users in Malaysia	Panasonic Malaysia Sdn Bhd
112	BOH Tea Malaysia Malaysia’s largest producer of premium black teas	BOH Plantations Sdn Bhd
113	Ripcurl Malaysia surfing sportswear	Wicked Wave Sdn Bhd
114	F&N Fun beverages	Fraser & Neave Holdings Bhd
115	BonusLink customer loyalty card	BonusKad Loyalty Sdn Bhd
116	Windows Malaysia OS by Microsoft	Microsoft Malaysia Sdn Bhd
117	Crocs Malaysia footwear brand	Kinderdijk Sdn Bhd
118	Yes 4G mobile Internet service provider	YTL Communications Sdn Bhd
119	My Clean and Clear facial products	Johnson & Johnson Sdn Bhd
120	Baskin Robbins Malaysia ice cream store chain	Golden Scoops Sdn Bhd
121	Shama Fashion House online women fashion boutique	Shama Fashion House
122	Ronasutra Mineral Makeup beauty products	Aurafine Marketing
123	Maybankard card products from Maybank	Maybank Bhd
124	Toshiba Regza Malaysia TV brand	Toshiba Sales & Services Sdn Bhd
125	Ed Hardy Malaysia clothing line inspired by Ed Hardy's famous tattoo designs	Ed Hardy Malaysia Sdn Bhd
126	BROS reusable water bottles brand	Living Wing Sdn Bhd
127	Haagen-Dazs Malaysia premium ice-cream	General Mills (M) Sdn Bhd
128	Proton Edar marketing unit of Proton	Proton Holdings Bhd
129	Michelin Malaysia tires maker	Michelin Malaysia Sdn Bhd
130	Gillette Malaysia men's grooming products	Gillette (M) Sdn Bhd

NOTES

• These Pages are created by businesses, local and foreign, to primarily engage with (there is a total of 12 million Facebook users in Malaysia.
• However, this List excludes public figures (i.e. Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad with over 1 million fans or Lisa Surihani with over 1.2 million fans) and non-business related Pages (i.e. No Mega Tower with over 200k fans).
• If there is a popular Malaysian Facebook Page missing from this Top 50 list, please recommend it in the Comments area below.

Updated: December 21 2011

Most Popular Facebook Pages in Malaysia originally appeared on GreyReview.com on November 4, 2010.

Between March and June this year, Thailand replaced Hong Kong as the sixth largest Facebook users in Asia, Pakistan replaced Singapore in no. 8 spot, and South Korea jumped from no. 13 to no. 11, replacing Vietnam. Also, Malaysia is fast approaching Taiwan to become the fourth largest Asian country on Facebook.

Fastest Growing Asian Countries on Facebook originally appeared on GreyReview.com on June 2, 2010.

Last year, I particularly enjoyed trolling the exhibition area for startups, which featured 30 awesome startups – iTwin and SocialWok – both went on to be featured on TechCrunch50 2009; iTwin, one of TC50 Finalists and SocialWok, winner of Demopit – Malaysian startups (Elevyn and Foldees), and others include Klout, eJamming Audiio, Fame, Orsiso, ThoughtBuzz and PieceHunters. The Startup Pitches session was great too and last year’s featured 8 startups – Countspin (US), iTwin (Singapore), Frenzoo (Hong Kong), Human Network Labs (Singapore), Socialwok (Singapore), Genkii (Japan), among others.

Bigger, Better Unconference SIngapore 2009, a 1-day event; echelon 2010 is going to be a 2-day event and will have 40 speakers, 50 startups, 8 case studies, 6 panel discussions, 4 keynotes! Thought leaders are Dave McClure of Founders Fund, Noah Kagan of Gambit (payment solution for virtual currency), Rex Ng of 6waves (social games publisher), Bernard Leong of Chlkboard (mobile ads delivery system), Yong Ming Guang of Socialwok (business social networking for enterprises), David Zhao of Zumodrive, Gen Kanai of Mozilla, just to name a few.

echelon 2010 will be held at Matrix @Biopolis, Singapore from 01 to 02 June 2010. Book your ticket here.

Enter the Echelon starring cool web startups and thought leaders in Asia. Coming soon originally appeared on GreyReview.com on April 15, 2010.

Orsiso version 1.1.26 (screenshot dated August 21 2009)

Orsiso version 1.1.36 (screenshot dated October 23 2009)

Albums section is where you get to view your friends photos, from both Flickr and Facebook. This is probably the stand-out feature and it does feel as if Orsiso is designed for this purpose. No other client, so far, allow user to search and view photos. You can search photo with keywords. You can share each photo easily on your social network e.g. Twitter and Facebook. View photo of friends, based on user-defined closeness filter.

Search and View Photos on Orsiso

Kinks and The Road Ahead

Orsiso is ambitious in scope but still far from perfect. Grouping is relatively inflexible. You can only group your friends, based on Closeness (using 1 to 4 scale). It would be great if it can offers the flexibility like Twitter List. I also find the updates streaming is not as real-time, as I want it to be. Although I set ‘check for updates’ to 1 minute, the updates stream (at times) doesn’t seem to refresh automatically. And no, it doesn’t have a refresh button. Orsiso’s Friend Merge feature enables you to combine the multiple ‘social’ profiles of your friends. This only work for some of my friends, but not others.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to more improvements in coming weeks, for it to seriously challenge social streams aggreggator like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. On commercialization, Orsiso has banner ads on its Contacts’ profile page (although, I think, this is still in experimental stage).

Orsiso Is Getting Good At Aggregating Status and Photo Streams originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 24, 2009.

Its Twitter account @every1connects with 184 followers; averaging 61 new followers per day over the past 3 days. The two key hashtags used are #ThroughMyWindow and #EveryoneConnects with the following stats:

• #ThroughMyWindow: a total 236 tweets from 154 contributors carrying the hashtag; averaging 33.7 tweets per day. And 10.6% are retweets.
• #EveryoneConnects: a total of 243 tweets from 165 contributors; averaging 34.7 tweets per day. And 5.8% are retweets. (Source: What’s The Hashtag?!)

On Facebook, there are already 947 fans on its Facebook Page (as of early this morning).. and before the week is over, I believe it can breach the 1,000-mark. To date, only 13 updates on its Wall. From these 13 updates, it generated a total of 94 comments. That’s average 7.2 comments per update!

What we can learn:

1. It is relatively easier to expand your community on Facebook compared to Twitter. Then, maybe it’s easier to go ‘viral’ on Facebook.
2. Facebook Wall with more richer contents (photo, video), which act as effective social objects for people to make spontaneous responses and also, engaging people and elicit their comments.
3. Higher re-tweet rate is useful for a hashtag can go viral. Or is it? Looking at the example of the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas with hashtag #spc09, which was in the Top 10 Trending early this morning (2am, Malaysian time), the retweet is 17.1% out of 12,020 tweets. In terms of retweet, both #ThroughMyWindow and #EveryoneConnects are not far off, 10.6% and 5.8% respectively. Both didn’t make it to the Top 10 trending but #throughmywindow was Trending in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Monday 19 2009; #throughmywindow was number two after ‘beyonce’ (Source: Trendsmap). Retweet help but it’s not really a critical factor. In the case of #spc09, total tweet per day is more than 1,700 tweets; each contributor averaging 7.2 tweets. Yes, to make it to Trending, you just need sheer number of people tweeting, at any one time.

Verdict: From reach and richness perspectives: Reach refers to total number of followers/fans and richness refers to the dynamics of engagements and conversations. In the case of EveryoneConnects, on both reach and richness dimensions, Facebook wins!

Twitter vs Facebook Face/Off For #EveryoneConnects originally appeared on GreyReview.com on October 22, 2009.

He also mentioned Twitter in 2006 is the “last time there has been a significant web application that comes along the social media space and captivated the whole world.” Interesting observation. Anyway, here are audio snippets from his keynote, accompanied by his slides.

Overview of Social Media landscape

What’s Hot, What’s Not

How many friends do you have?

Youth and Social Networks

Age Groups and Social Networks

Web Evolution

Maturing Social Networks

TechCrunch Quote

The Road Ahead for Social Networks

The Shifts

You can view Ian Stewart’s entire presentation slides here.

What’s Now, What’s Next for Social Networking: Ian Stewart, Friendster (with audio clips) originally appeared on GreyReview.com on September 25, 2009.

Malaysians love Social Networking too

There are about 16 million Internet users in Malaysia and IDC Research projected Malaysian Internet users will reach 20.4 million by 2012. In March this year, the number of Facebook users in Malaysia surpassed the one million mark. Recently, a brief survey by YouthSays, Malaysia’s largest youth community website with over 160,000 members, showed 95% of a total of 900 respondents have Friendster’s account, 90% with Facebook and 38% with Twitter (This survey was presented at the recent Malaysian Media Congress 2009).

In Malaysia, the social networking penetration rate was 66.6% in December 2008 (see Table below), behind only to Singapore (74.3%) and South Korea (68%). See Table below.

In terms of Average Minutes Spent on Social Network(s) Per Visitor, Malaysia ranked second at 181.2 minutes after Korea (277.8 min) and ahead of Singapore (175.6 min), Hong Kong (127.7 min), India (110.4 min) and Japan (72.8 min).

Top Social Networks in Malaysia

Like elsewhere in the world, Facebook and Twitter are the superstars these days in Malaysia. Besides these two, what are the other popular social networks Malaysians spending their time these days? Alexa and Google Ad Planner can provide some answers. Alexa Traffic Rank measures website popularity and calculated using average daily visitors and pageviews over the past three months whereas Google Ad Planner is “based on an automated analysis of millions of search queries and site visits” and Unique Visitors refer to number of people visiting the site over a specific month.

Based on the Table below, Facebook is the top social network in Malaysia, followed by YouTube and Friendster. Twitter is the 8th most popular social network in Malaysia.

Top Malaysian Social Networks

Despite the phenomenal popularity of Facebook, etc., there are a handful of Malaysian social networks offering localized contents and services. Some of the notable local social networks are Ruumz, eKawan, GoEatOut, Circles99, FriendX, eMeiMei and Pacmee.

So, how popular are these social networks? For a starter, these social networks are nowhere near global social network brands like Facebook and Friendster, in terms of Malaysian users. Launched in February 2009, Ruumz is today’s most popular Malaysia social network, followed by eKawan (social network for Malay-speaking community) and GoEatOut (dining guide-cum-social network). See Table below.

Discussion

Facebook is replacing Friendster as Malaysian top social network; Facebook outranked Friendster in Alexa and also, Facebook with more unique visitors from Malaysia compared Friendster (Google Ad Planner). However, according to a Friendster Summary Fact Sheet posted on TechCrunch, the social network boasted a total of 2.1 million active users in Malaysia compared to 1.1 million Facebook users in Malaysia.

Malaysians are using global social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster compared to local social networks. Only a few countries are dominated by homegrown social networks, namely Mixi in Japan, Cyworld in Korea, QiQi in China, Cloob in Iran, Maktoob in Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Dubai, Kuwait), StudiVZ in Germany, Hyves in The Netherlands, iWiW in Hungary, Nasza-Klasa in Poland, and Vkontakte.ru in Russia.

How do these local social networks compete? Sites like Pacmee, Friendx, eKawan and eMeiMei tied its social networks to mobile services and deliver value-added services e.g. posting photo via MM and receive status updates via SMS.

Ruumz offers different blend of value-added services on its social network. For example, online music subscription, photo printing and photobook services. With its unique brand positioning and services, Ruumz can differentiate itself in the local social networking scene.

But will it be able to dent Facebook’s armor? Quite unlikely in short-term. Rather than competing head-on with the social network giants, local social networks can thrive by offering different social networking experiences. Facebook and Friendster, for example, are typically broad-based type social network and offer culturally relevant experience is probably not their strong suit. Herein lies the opportunity for Malaysian social networks.

And maybe Malaysian social networks can learn something from the ascendancy of Old Town White Coffee, a Malaysian-based coffee chain. Amidst the crowded marketplace dominated by global brands like Starbucks and Coffee Beans, Old Town able to differentiate its offerings and capture marketshare in Malaysia (and elsewhere in Asia).

Conclusion

This article offers a snapshot of social networking activities and the popular social networks in Malaysia. The leading social networks are Facebook, YouTube and Friendster whereas top Malaysian social networks are Ruumz, eKawan and GoEatOut. Local social networks provide diversity in the social networking landscape and offer choices to Malaysians. Possibly, local players can eventually offer more culturally relevant social networking experiences with localized contents and services.

Snapshot of Social Networking in Malaysia originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 28, 2009.