Last week at the 2008 NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference, someone raised a question about using social networking sites in other countries to connect with students and scholars.
While Facebook and MySpace are ubiquitous in the USA and have been growing globally, they are not the only social networking sites out there and are not always the most popular - or even available - internationally.?So let's take a very brief look at what is happening with the social networking explosion in other countries.
In February 2008, USA Today featured an article about social networking internationally, titled "Social-networking sites going global". And Ben Lorica of O'Reilly Radar blog gathered information about the global growth of social networking sites in "Where Does Facebook Grow From Here".?
VentureBeat.com featured an article in June 2008, titled "The Latin American social networking wars: Market leader Hi5 has been growing, but so has Facebook ? and Sonico?".?Latin America's growing market has a number of major players, among them?Hi5,?Sonico, Facebook and Google's Orkut (especially in Brazil).
Southeast Asia has?Friendster.?Hi5?and?Orkut?are big in South Asia.?Bebo?and?LiveJournal?are in parts of Europe.
Have you been using any networks besides Facebook and MySpace to interact with students and scholars? Have you used languages other than English? What have your experiences been?
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In my past job I traveled extensively in Asia and Europe. One thing that I found that crossed cultural and language boundaries was MMPORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game). WOW, Everquest, Star Wars, and others were ways for people to interact using a common interest. I’ve also heard that these venues cab be used for team meetings for corporate or other events. The web provides a number of out of the box ways for us to communicate across the world.
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