David Emery Online

The biggest social network you've never heard of

8 May 2007

Today I’m going to continue the social networking kick I seem to be on at the moment – sorry about that, I’ll try to find something more interesting to right about tomorrow.

Anyway, introducing the biggest social network you’ve never heard of:

Netlog

First impressions are pretty much same old same old; you can almost tick off the routine features (profiles pages, friends, blogs, photos etc), and the design aesthetic is Web 2.0 101, with shiny bits everywhere and bubbly, rounded fonts (neither of these things are necessarily a bad thing, though – in the social software space good design is at a premium).

They do have a few interesting features dotted about, particularly in the music section where they seem to be going for a Last.fm angle with auto-generated artist pages, featuring players, charts, play counts and the like. However, on the whole they’re fairly uninteresting.

So, why write about them?

This is why:

In the graph above Netlog’s traffic is the sharply rising blue line, which has shot past Bebo – the previous holder of the crown “Biggest social network you’ve never heard of”. Also worth noting, while we’re here, Facebook’s steady increase – they’re apparently adding a million users a week…

Netlog shares quite a lot with Bebo; the two sites resemble each other in many ways, not least of which the method they’ve managed to sneak up the traffic rankings. The key thing is, neither Bebo or Netlog are popular in the US; and the US has such an all-pervading influence over the media that covers this space that anything popular overseas just doesn’t garner much attention.

Bebo’s audience comes primarily from the UK and Ireland (where it’s the number 1 top ranking site at time of writing), and similarly Netlog’s main heartland is mainland Europe, with Belgium, France and Italy topping the rankings.

I think it’s fascinating how some sites can be hugely popular, but never get written about due to their locality; I’d understand better if there was a language barrier, but Netlog (and many other like it) has an english version that works well. I guess what it boils down to is there are only so many sites that the mainstream blogging media (yes, that means TechCrunch et al; yes, I did indeed call them mainstream) can write about. And I guess it’s hard for them to properly cover ones that aren’t based in silicon valley – they can’t even cover ones based in the UK, let alone ones based in Belgium…