It's a small world

We've all heard about how the Internet renders geography irrelevant. The practical implications of that, however, are causing headaches for companies whose business plans didn't consider unexpected popularity in foreign markets, Wired News reports:

Friendster, which today has millions of Filipino members, is one of a number of advertising-supported internet sites grappling with the dilemma of how to take advantage of unforeseen overseas popularity. Such sites are finding that business models that work in large, developed countries need serious readjustment in nations with small populations or low internet-penetration rates.

Of course, for U.S.-based websites, attention from overseas is nothing new. Yahoo, Google and other top internet sites have long generated page views from all corners of the globe.

But more recently, among social-networking sites where new users invite friends and business colleagues to sign up, international growth is occurring at an exceptionally rapid rate. Sites that thought they'd grow in the United States before expanding overseas are instead taking off in unexpected places.

Wired News notes that LinkedIn is a hit in Scandinavian countries and Israel while Orkut's population is now 66 percent Brazilian. However, international popularity isn't limited to social networks: more than half of eBay's registered users live outside the United States, according to Byte Level Research.