Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are well known as the largest social networking sites in North America. But have you heard of Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Mixi, Cyworld, Imeem, Friendster and QQ, the mother of all social networking sites?

These sites are more popular outside of the North America. Facebook and MySpace dominate the social-networking landscape in North America but they are beaten out by Orkut and Hi5 in South America, according to a study by Strategy Analytics presented at a conference I attended. Orkut is linked with Google.

While Facebook and MySpace.com also dominate in Europe, Bebo comes in third. Bebo, was bought by AOL for under a billion dollars in 2008, a decision the struggling company now regrets, I am sure. After all Facebook reportedly only pulls in $150 million a year in advertising revenues. How do you generate a return when you paid top dollar for a whisper on the Internet?

Facebook also dominates in Africa, but Hi5 is in second place. In Asia, both Facebook and MySpace are out of the picture. Instead, Mixi is the dominant site in Japan. As of May 2008, Mixi reportedly had 10 million users and an 80 percent share of the social networking market in Japan. Meanwhile Cyworld is the big cheese in South Korea. Imeem, a social music service started by the founders of Napster, is big in Asia, ahead of Orkut.

The kicker is QQ, which makes Facebook look like a pipsqueak. Of course, to gain those numbers QQ, owned by Tencent, has to be big in China. PFSK, a consultancy, says the company's annual report claims QQ has about 300 million active users. PFSK points out this number is 50 percent more than the number of Internet subscribers in China. However, apparently many Chinese hold more than one subscription with the site. QQ makes about $523 million in revenues a year, about four times that of Facebook, and is profitable.

For all you social networking entrepreneurs out there, note that the bulk of the revenues, 66 percent, were made selling digital goods and games. Mobile services brought in another $110 million while advertising brought in the rest.

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The bozos running the city of Bozeman in Montana experienced getting netganged when it came out in news reports that they were requiring job candidates to provide the passwords to their Facebook and other social-networking sites in their applications. So harsh was the criticism from all quarters that after a week of publicity the city caved in and reversed their policy. Local TV reported that city officials were receiving "an email a minute" during the height of the bombardment. Even so it is unbelievable that the city's manager, Chris Kuluski, seems to not have gotten the message.

"The city of Bozeman believes we have a responsibility to ensure candidates hired for positions of public trust are subject to a thorough background check," Kuluski said in a press release. "The extent of our regulation for a candidate's password, username or other Internet information appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community."

Appears to? Give a person with some power a computer and an Internet connection and all of a sudden it seems to bring out the 'Controller' that lies await in all of us. Kuluski is ending the practice not because it is wrong to intrude on a person's privacy or personal life, but because of community pressure, he says. Kuluski and the city's government obviously believe it is still good practice to get all of the information on a person's social life.

Applying this logic, if Facebook did not exist they would be justified in interviewing a job candidate's spouse, children, friends and hangers on. They would be justified in rooting through his garbage can for evidence of an unworthy candidate. They would even get permission to browse a candidate's credit card payments to see whether they were porn or drug addicts.

People power on the Internet has proved over and over again in numerous cases to be a potent force in getting people to think again about the justness of their actions.

Thank goodness for that. But one would hope people would not only consider the implications of their actions, but also the thinking behind them.

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