MySpace co-founder and chief executive Chris DeWolfe was quoted by the Financial Times yesterday and said that the first localized, non-English versions of MySpace will be available this summer. The company has designated 11 countries to target, naming specifically only France, Germany, China and India. I’ll place my bets on Japan, Korea, Brazil and Italy making the list as well, based on Technorati’s April state of the blogosphere report.
The discussion emerged out of the announcement that 40 year old David Fischer has been appointed as managing director for the UK and Europe. DeWolfe told the Financial Times that media partnerships were being developed internationally to deliver local content to new users and that mobile devices would play a larger role in MySpace’s international plans than they have to date in the US.
MySpace already has 75 million registered users generating nearly 30 billion page views per month. Compare that to the largest blogging platform in China, Bokee, which had 2 million users as of February. Whether people in places like France and China are interested in using a US based social networking service will be interesting to watch.
Thanks to Loren Baker for posting about this.
Social networking services is the new thing now and people will difinitely be willing to try new services that allow them to fully interact and take advantage of the services. So, Bokee would definitely have some great competition with the new targeted myspace non-english versions and it could possibly be the next largest blogging platform.
They could simply add SUBDOMAINS to MySpace.com to represent each language for that site – or with AJAX tech becoming so developed, perhaps they could just EMBED language tools options onto the main MySpace for the “Romance Languages”.
It will be interesting to see Which Search Engine they finally decide to partner with.
Have a gut feeling that YouTube and Digg will become partners with MySpace.
Myspace is too bloated as it is. They need to overhaul their site, improve URL structure, and clean up a bunch of other stuff as well.
Anybody know how many people of the 75 million users are real?
I am sure the China version will be heavily censored “voluntarily” by myspace.com cronies.
Here we go, awesome comments suggesting that MySpace is the Walmart of the internet because it’s not a Web 2.0 company.
Localization is a tiny part of the equation. Localization alone won’t bring riches to MySpace. Perhaps in a few cases it might, but in others, they’d have to do a lot more. Ask eBay.
I could throw in a few clues but I’m sure they’ll figure them out if they haven’t done it yet. Besides, I and the co-founder of possibly the largest “YASN” site for Spanish speaking users (20+ million users through all our web properties), and I’d rather give MySpace a run for their money
MySpace should focus on improving its existing service before branching out. Many of the newer social networking services have far better feature sets and a stronger, better thought out platform. The only reason MySpace is still so dominant is because it reached critical mass. If MySpace were to enter the market today, I doubt it would achieve anywhere near the success it had. It’s a perfect example of how timing is everything and first-mover advantage can be significant.
That said, it is not simply a matter of creating different language versions of your site. There’s a lot more to localization than language. Without a clear understanding of the people and culture, you will fail. Hopefully MySpace recognizes that and will hire locals to not only implement the regional websites, but to organize and design them. I have lived in several European countries and do not think their existing setup will be popular in some of them without modifications that are based upon the specific cultures of that country. Furthermore, MySpace should know that similar extremely popular community services already exist in Europe and that getting users to migrate to MySpace will be difficult, especially when it is widely known that MySpace is an American corporation. Anybody that has done business overseas will tell you that it can be difficult to gain credibility and trust when you’re an outsider. It’s doubly difficult when you happen to be owned by Rupert Murdoch.
our country is named Germany, not German.
There are already a lot of Germans on there, and I guess French people and others as well. It’s not an us-exclusive thing as some may think.
Doesn’t change the fact that that site feels and looks like it’s held together with gaffertape. More users surely doesn’t compensate that but make it worse. One day, people will be sick of it. Especially then teens use other socialnetworksites and the myspaceusers grow out of the myspaceage, this will end. hopefully…
There’s this little site called Mixi which dominates Japan social networking sites, and MySpace won’t put a dent in it.
http://en.wikip...a.org/wiki/Mixi
Of course a US based soc. net site would work…but I think the real threat is MSN Spaces. A lot of people in france use that as well as Yahoo! services. I think compared to MySpace they are subpar, but of course MySpace isn’t all that in itself.
My apologies to our fine readers in Germany, thanks Marcel.
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ‘ਚ? ਤੂੰ, ਮੈਂ ਜੇ ਆਪ?
Myspace has already reached the french market, trough the hip music bands, then everyone. Its becoming more and more popular, spreading from the original nest of hipsters. Though its still far from the very popular blogging portal Skyblog, owned by the radio Skyrock, and its nearly 5 million users (on a population of 62 million in France / 97% of users are between 12 and 18 years old), which still is not supporting RSS nor trackbacks, but used as a social networking tool.
I bet on a Brazzilian version o MySpace. Today, brazilian dominate Orkut, Google social site. Brazilians have more then 70% of all Orkut users, estimated in 12 million users worldwide.
If Myspace can nab a large social networking marketshare in areas like Asia or South America, that just might get them a shot in the arm they’ll need to continue being relevant. They’ve pretty much done all that they can do in the US.
Myspace already has a “uk” subsite. And I don’t think it’s as popular as the US. The UK being the parent culture of the United States, American and British culture are pretty close to each other and if myspace has not yet been able to dominate the UK market, I think this shows that global expansion is simply beyond translation.
I also feel like a global bazaar of people on one site such as myspace might not be able to penetrate beyond a certain niche in the populations of the new countries myspace is planning to go into. The fact is, most people like to stick to the comfort zone of their culture and language and prefer to remain segregated. I think the Orkut experience has proven that quite well. Since the Brazilians took over Orkut, all the rest of the people flocked out. In a similar way LiveJournal is dominated by Russians, and Friendster by Filipinos.
We have Zurna.com that we launched for the Turkish market, and we partnered with a company in Bulgaria to launch BgBox.com. The local expertise helped and bgbox is slowly growing. Our Russian site, doodka.com, is still slow, because we didn’t have the local partnership, and gringoo.com almost dead in the same way. Without the understanding of local culture, and customization of the site for local culture, social networks will not take off. and I doubt myspace can do this quick enough without breaking it’s current status quos.
Bebo is at it as well and will open a UK office this summer.
You heard it here first:
http://www.i-bo...d-as-uk-md.html
~G~
Is it true that social netwroking is not as popluar as blogging in France? What are some of the popular French social networking sites? Given France’s blog population, I would think that the French would take to social netwroking sooner than the UK; but this, it seems have’nt happened. Please correct me if I am wrong.
It will be interesting to see what happens
here. In China, there is already some pretty
good competition in the social networking
arena, namely mop.com…
Myspace’s natural advantage may be said to
be its expertise, in this area, and its large
membership. But I can not see a clear and
competitive advantage for them when they
already have great competition in foreign
countries and they will have a very real
‘language’ obstacle.
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thanks