Facebook Face-Offs

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Facebook is moving into the global market with much success, but according to BusinessWeek, the competition overseas has the traffic, and the brands, to put up a decent fight. Here are the social networking sites defending their turf:

Hyves: The Netherlands: 5.7 million users
Hyves is based on the English word “beehive”. It has extended its brand beyond the title, naming the bulletin board feature (equivalent to Facebook’s ‘wall’) “krabbel.” This created word has become so popular, it may find its way into the Dutch dictionary.

Tuenti: Spain: 5.1 million users
Tuenti, pronounced ‘twenty’ in English, actually comes from “tu enti[dad],” meaning “your entity.”

StudiVZ: Germany: 14.6 million users
The name is an abbreviation of the German expression Studentenverzeichnis, which means students’ directory. A secondary directory, MeinVZ, is available for all other adults.

Skyrock: France: 12 million
Skyrock was created in 1985 as a national FM radio station in France. It branched off into blog platforms in 2002 under the name Skyblog.com, and finally hit the social networking market in 2007 as SkyRock.com. The largest French-speaking site of its kind, it has been named the “Free People Network” by its fans.

Mixi: Japan : 11.4 million users
Mixi focuses on “community entertainment”, and connections on the site are called myMIXI, or MAIMIKU, which means buddy or friend. Each visitor to a page leaves a permanent, traceable “ashi oto,” or footprint. Mixi has been such a force with Japanese youth that a new term, “Mixi tsukare (Mixi Fatigue)”, has been coined to describe the psychological state of Mixi overuse.

Contributed by: Maghan Cook