The Le Monde website has a colourful map of social networking use by continent.

It’s important for SEOs and website promoters to remember that there is more to life than MySpace and Facebook. This resource can also help you target overseas markets effectively.

There are some interesting points to note:

• Orkut is the big winner in Latin America.
• The Russians love Live Journal.
• Windows Live Spaces is not doing well in any market.

Some Notable Omissions

In Europe, there is no data for Germany or Spain - do they not use social networks yet? According to ComScore, adoption is pretty slow.

Buenos Aires is home to the Spanish language newcomer, Sonico, which TechCrunch reports is gaining new users quickly, so it might make inroads into Spain. It will have stiff competition, as Facebook has just launched a Spanish language version.

There is no data for China, either and this seems to be an oversight by the creators of the map. Read/Write Web certainly found some interesting data.

Japan’s run-away social networking leader Mixi is not represented either, but that may be because the site is invite only.

Language & Localisation

Language seems to be the single biggest factor in choosing a social network. English may be the language of the internet, but for socialising, the ability to use your native language is a vital factor in adoption.

This has big implications for web application developers, as internationalisation is a complex and difficult issue.