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• Singapore ranked 10th in Facebook penetration by country.
• Reason: language barriers, Friendster's early penetration, competition from localised sites and Facebook's heavy bandwidth issues and a somewhat complicated interface.
• Asians prefer local social network sites like Cyworld, Orkut, Mixi and Xiaonei which cater to their needs better.
It is easy to assume that this world is universal, and that this universality extends to our usage of social networking sites since it seems like the whole world is on Facebook. This is especially so when Singaporeans been quick to embrace it, ranking Singapore 10th in Facebook country penetration.
However, despite its success in Singapore, the rest of Asia hasn't followed on. A report from comScore has shown that Facebook is far from conquering Asia with a shocking only 7.1% of Facebook users coming from Asia-Pacific.
This impeded inception can perhaps be attributed to various factors – language barriers, competition from localised sites and Facebook's heavy bandwidth issues and a somewhat complicated interface.
Instead, sites like hi5, Orkut, Yahoo! 360, Xanga, Mixi, Friendster, Cyworld and Xiaonei are taking the different countries in Asia by storm. These local sites are better able to cater to the markets they serve as they know the country well. For example, the Japanese take delight in showing their individualistic side by dressing their Mixi profiles with customised skins and avatars, while Yahoo! 360 allows users to blog, and thus meeting the needs of Vietnamese users. Possibly the strongest contender is Friendster, marking its gradual shift from the US market to firmly dominate Asia Pacific with a vast majority of its members now from this continent.
In Thailand, where the usage of English is rather limited, Hi5 attributes its popularity to the fact that it offers Thai as a language. Naturally, they are comfortable sticking to Hi5 and this has impeded the growth of Facebook.
The Vietnamese, who are big on blogging, much prefer Yahoo! 360 to Facebook as the former has a blogging function, making it the top choice.
Facebook can't fight with Friendster when almost 40% of Friendster users come from the Philippines. In a smart move, Friendster introduced a mobile version to counter the low internet usage in the country, allowing users to use a chat application on their mobile phones with the Mobile Broadcast System. This probably accounts for the very high percentage of Friendster users.
All in all, with Facebook only coming up as the favourite social networking site in only two out of eleven countries, this shows that it has yet to gain a significant critical mass in Southeast Asia. In another study by comScore, a startling figure shows the lack of interest in Facebook – only 7.1% of Facebook's visitors come from the Asia-Pacific region.
Although Facebook hasn't managed to emulate the success it has enjoyed elsewhere, it is very slowly picking up popularity in this region. And, whether Facebook will take the effort to understand the markets here in its bid to penetrate the Asian market remains a highly anticipated move.
Smoking is one of the most widespread addictions in the world. As smoking also brings harms to the society and the people around there have been innumerable efforts worth millions to curb the instances of smoking atleast in the public places in order to safeguard the innocent victims. Smoking is at an unprecedented high in the developed countries, now the trend is fast picking up in the developing countries also. In order to put a halt to the ever increasing rates of smoking, the researchers of Sydney University have taken up the task of educating the people of Asia Pacific on the harms of smoking, so that they can curb the further expansion of the addiction in the places where the addiction is still under control.
Among the developing countries smoking has managed to carve a substantial place for itself in China and India. Even though India is a third world country smoking is widely prevalent-be it the richest class or the people who are living below the poverty line. In China also the situation is the same if not the worse. Smoking has engulfed about 320 million Chinese people in its smoke. Most of these smokers are men and the interesting part is that over 50% of the Chinese doctors are also smokers. In the developing countries of the Asia Pacific region, smoking among women is not as common as in the developed countries. Women run the risk of dying from lung cancer double as that of men. As such it is extremely important that in the Asia Pacific region where smoking is still not an epidemic among women; the trend must be stopped from expanding. And this can be only done when awareness regarding the dangers of smoking and the advantages that can be derived by are highlighted. The researchers also focused on the fact that if a smoker decides to quit smoking he or she can cut down on his or her chances of getting lung cancer by 70%. Creating awareness about the addiction might not seem to be a viable option for the purpose of controlling the exploding smoking rate all over, as this method has not shown many results in the countries of Europe and the USA. But this method worked wonders in Australia which once topped among the high smoking rate countries and now is at far bottom. So the researchers are playing on this method of creating awareness, atleast in the Asia pacific countries so that the overall smoking rate can be cut down.
The developed countries are doing their bit by inventing quit smoking drugs which can help people quit the smoke for life. One such breakthrough has come in the form of . You can even if you wish to rid yourself of this devastating addiction. Get a prescription before you buy chantix or having the drug can prove to be harmful.