Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Overcoming cultural differences

With Web 2.0, we have seen a growth in number of social networking sites.These sites have grown in US and europe,but think about the potential users for such sitesfrom Asia and India.To overcome cultural differences is I feel a major obstacle for thesesites.We need to study user patterns,local preferences in order to encourage people to join in.Orkut for example is more popular in Brazil and India but is not so popular in the US.

3 comments:

avarner said...

This sort of thing seems to be a huge problem when placing a product or service outside its country of origin. I suppose anyone with a business model to remedy it would make plenty of money ;)

Harry Chen said...

There are two ways to go about creating a Web start-up. One is to innovate, and the other is to copy. The latter approach is relatively popular in many developing countries.

http://tinyurl.com/ywzpj7

http://tinyurl.com/2agfd4

Some may argue that copying successful Web 2.0 sites in a foreign language is hardly an innovation. But, it works. Many clone sites address the issue of language and culture barrier.

Remember this. The emergence of globalization requires a new thinking about the participation of non-English-speaking communities in Web 2.0.

Sarah Stanger said...

Here is a cool map that shows where different social networking sites are popular. It's interesting to see how some sites (ex: Facebook) have a user base distributed across many different countries and languages.