[joe_the_user]

Scanning your link,

It seems like the majority of the non-Facebook figure comes from Chinese language sites. Since social networking sites will quite likely be segmented by language for the foreseeable future, I don't think this really counts. In the English-language world, Facebook has serious network effect and you would be hard-pressed to combine all of FB's competitors into anything.

I agree dispersed social networking is coming... I'm not sure if "control" of data is the way to phrase the "problem"... Still, creating a dispersed network where each contributor controls where their data goes is a very hard problem.

[jlgbecom]

Sort by Registered Users. You don't even need the Chinese language site (QZone).

Habbo + MySpace + Bebo + Orkut + Friendster + Hi5 = 679 million. Assuming 50% cross-over (which is a very high estimate), that means 340 million unique users, for just six social networks.

And that is nothing to sneeze at.

[joe_the_user]

I was mistaken.

The sites I hadn't heard of aren't Chinese language sites but failed English language sites. But they are still failed sites. I don't go to my two Myspace pages, ever.

[eli]

Orkut is not really competing with Facebook. It's huge in Brazil, but has very few English speaking users left.

[bbgm]

And in India, where Orkut used to be big, almost everyone I know has migrated to Facebook, so those numbers include a large number of accounts no one is using

[lhnz]

The thing is, I doubt a decentralized social networking approach would really be allowed by the Chinese government. This kind of solution can only really gain ground in very open countries if at all...

[mnutt]

Is anyone trying to solve the data control problem right now?