It’s maybe the largest social network on Earth and I bet you’ve never heard of it

February 26th, 2009 by Scott Wolf

“How can that be?” you may be asking yourself. “What else can there be besides the Facebooks and MySpaces and so on? And what could be bigger than 175 million users?” The answer? China.

TechCrunch recently reported that the popular Chinese social networking and instant messaging site QZone, owned by “China’s largest and most used internet service portal” Tencent, has grown to more than 200 million users as of the end of January. Now that 200 million isn’t all for one service, but rather seems to be spread across at least two major ones—QZone, which accounts for 3/4 of the users and is primarily blogging, photo uploading, and finding friends, and QQ, which accounts for the other 1/4 and is primarily an instant messaging service.

The numbers may be inflated, or they may in fact be real. I can’t tell. And I don’t know if experts like Robin Wauters who reported it on TechCrunch can tell either. She and others at TechCrunch dug up some comparison reports that suggest totally different visitor numbers. All I know is the Western Hemisphere accounts for 14% of the Earth’s population, while Asia alone accounts for about 60%. And, with the advance of globalization and rapid technological development of Asian nations, who knows how large social networking sites originating in places such as China and India (whose combined population accounts for almost 40% of the Earth’s) could grow.

I have a lot of friends and family on these sites, and a number of friends and family who choose not to join them. But imagine living in a world where EVERYONE literally was on one social networking site. Whoa. A privately-owned company having databases upon databases of personal info and interests for every single person. I just hope by then Keanu Reeves is still around to save us.

— Scott Wolf

This entry was posted by Scott Wolf on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 and is filed under Blogging, Online Advertising, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.