Facebook grows fastest on social networking sites in global bloom

August 13 News, although social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut and Friendster are all built in the US, social networking is a global phenomenon. Web sites like Facebook are growing rapidly in the world, despite the slowdown in their own countries, according to new statistics from the Research institute comscore.

Earlier this Tuesday, performance company Pingdom published figures from Google's "Insights for Search" service. These figures show that different social networks have different levels of "interest" around the world. ComScore also published some figures in Tuesday, showing that social networking sites are becoming increasingly global in nature, sometimes even more than expected.

Social networking sites may be close to the top in North America, according to ComScore's figures. Social networking sites in the US and Canada have grown by only 9% compared with June 2007. But Asia's growth rate is 23%, Latin America's growth rate is 33%, Europe's growth rate is 35%. The growth rate in the Middle East and Africa is 66%. The growth rate for Internet users worldwide is 11%, ComScore said. This means that North America is the only region where the growth rate of global social networking sites has not exceeded the growth rate of Internet users.

The fastest growing is the Facebook site, where the number of visitors to the site has increased by 153%. Most of the growth comes from international regions, where growth is expected to be 38%. The HI5 site in San Francisco has a large market share in Latin America, with a growth rate of 100%. Another social networking site in the San Francisco area Friendster a growth rate of 50%, and renewed interest among Asian users is one factor driving growth. The growth rate of Google's Orkut website is 41%. AOL's Bebo website grew at a rate of 32%. The French social networking site Skyrock a growth rate of 19%.

News Corp's MySpace remains the largest social networking site in the United States, according to comscore, but its growth in international markets is not very good. MySpace site users grew by only 3%.