Social-networking sights on Asia

There's a "colossal scrum among the world's biggest social networks for the hearts and mouse clicks of millions of people in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia," Business Week reports. It adds that MySpace and Facebook are scrambling to replace "established homegrown networks and foreign sites, especially Orkut and Friendster" (Orkut has a well-established beachhead in India, which also has at least a dozen "homegrown" social sites, and Friendster in Southeast Asia). MSNBC reports that "MySpace began rolling out local language sites about a year and a half ago and now has 24 in 20 countries, in 12 languages, including French, German and Japanese," though France-based Skyrock has about 70% of that country's social-networking market. " In Poland, local site Grono.net has a strong following, with more than 1.3m registered users. In Russia, LiveJournal, a San Francisco-based blogging site, has a strong following, and Yandex, a local company that dominates the country's internet search market, far overshadowing Google, owns its own social networking site, MoiKrug.ru."