Top Social Networks from the Top Internet Countries

Looking at the top 5 countries with the highest number of Internet users, we see China in the lead with 20.8% of the worlds users, the US with 13.1%, Japan with 5.5%, India with 4.7% and Brazil with 3.9%. So we thought it would be cool to look at the most popular social networks from each of those countries.

China

1. Renren.com – This social network is a Facebook clone and boasts over 120 million users (but bear in mind that number comes from Renren and may well be exaggerated). The network was formerly known as Xiaonei (‘inside campus’) and officially changed its name to RenRen (‘people’s web’) in August 2009. This change in name reflects the company’s plans to capture more than just the student share of the market.

2. Kaixin001.com – Another huge social network, this one with a self-reported member count of 75 million. Kaixin001 is aimed mainly at white collar workers and came to popularity through its creation of popular networking games, such as Happy Farm and Slave Manor (a copy of Facebook’s Friends For Sale). In 2009, the company successfully sued the owners of Renren for unfair competition, after they bought kaixin.com as a domain and set up a clone site.

3. Qzone.com – Although Qzone claims a massive 388 million users, many of these are drawn from its sister company QQ (the largest instant messenger service in China) and are dormant accounts. These networks, together with QQ Games, QQ Show and QQ Pet, are owned by the massively profitable Tencent. However, the site is badly designed and very much behind the curve compared to its competitors.

(Sources: Readwriteweb, SocialNetworkingWatch and VentureBeat)

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Reddit Takes Over Digg (#diggrevolt Part 2)

Digg’s Kevin Rose might be talking about traffic increases, new user signup numbers, and mixed reviews, but the rest of the world is seeing a new Digg version almost unanimously hated by the Digg audience. So much so that the first #diggrevolt since the infamous DVD code incident was launched the other day, which caused Kevin Rose to acknowledge some of the problems and even bring some features back from the old Digg v3, like the upcoming section, which would show stories that were on their way to becoming popular.

Another aspect that has really caused a lot of anger amongst Digg users, is the new power that publisher accounts appear to have. Even though Digg is not admitting it, they are allowing publisher accounts to take over the front page with a really low vote threshold. At one point 4 of the last 5 Digg front page promotions where from Mashable, but the funniest has to be the current front page, which is showing almost exclusively Reddit.com submissions (and a TweetMeme story).

Note these are not stories from Reddit’s blog or their users, but rather links to Reddit.com story submissions.

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/d6vod/beware_of_dog/

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/d6wr8/what_the_fuck_an_influential_israeli_rabbi_has/

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d6tvv/worlds_largest_tidal_turbine_1mw_to_be_deployed/

Digg is attempting to make adjustments to the promotion algorithm, but many wonder if any loyal users will be around by the time they get it fixed. OR if maybe the problem is really just in new version as a whole.

EDIT: It appears that all the Reddit.com submissions hitting Digg’s front page is part 2 of the #diggrevolt and meant to show the flaws in Digg’s new publisher system.

EDIT 2: It appears that even with revolt, Digg still has the traffic to take a site down. Reddit has been down for some time now since getting almost every single front page slot on Digg.

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