Social gaming is an international phenomenon. While Zynga is the leading social gaming company in the U.S., in Brazil it is a company called Vostu. The company has been growing rapidly and just closed a $30 million series C financing led by Tiger Management, with Accel Partners joining the round. Accel partner Jim Breyer, who sits on Facebook’s board, will take a board seat on Vostu. Previous investors Intel Capital and General Catalyst partners also participated. Investors purchased about 10 percent of the company in this latest round, giving Vostu a post-money valuation of roughly $300 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. Including previous rounds, Vostu now has raised a total of $46 million.

Vostu boasts 20 million active players a month, a tenfold increase from the beginning of the year. With only 40 percent Internet penetration in Brazil, that means that about a quarter of all Brazilians who are on the Internet play a Vostu game. Vostu currently has six social games (including a farm game, poker game, as well as soccer and crime role playing games) which are played on Brazil’s largest social network, Google-owned Orkut.

Almost all the revenues comes from virtual currency, which players spend inside the games. It is almost all micropayments, with a little advertising. Vostu coins can be bought via cash at convenience stores through prepaid scratch cards, or via SMS and charged directly to their cell phone bills.

The company was founded in 2007 by three Harvard classmates: CEO Daniel Kafie, chief scientist Mario Schlosser, and Joshua Kushner (who is also an active seed investor through Thrive Capital). The founders have said that Vostu is profitable. Vostu is managed from New York City, but employs more than 200 people in two game-creation studios in Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo.

This is important for two reasons: Brazil and India. Orkut is still by far the dominant social network in Brazil for the simple reason that that’s where everyone’s friends still are. And while Facebook has surpassed Orkut in India, Orkut is still a strong number two.

While, most people have identities on multiple social networks, most of us rely on one core service to organize our social lives more than the others. And because of the hassle of filling out a new profile, adding all new friends and importing photos all over again, changing social networks is hard. This is a big reason Friendster kept its lock on Southeast Asia as long as it did– although in places like Indonesia that too has been eroded by Facebook in the last year or so.

But for whatever reason, Orkut has been stickier, despite Google not putting a lot of work behind keeping it competitive. Not anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brazil and India are rivaling Indonesia as Facebook’s second largest audience in a few weeks.

From what I can tell, the swarm caught Facebook by surprise and I imagine it caught Google by even more surprise. For a company so intent on going social– did they just bungle two of the huge markets where they had an edge? We’ve called both companies for comments and will post more when they get back to us.

Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk a bit with our own Michael Arrington. After she revealed a couple new Google Instant features, she went right into another topic: social.

Michael (of course) asked Mayer to disclose Google’s plans for their upcoming social strategy. Mayer (of course) would not do that. But then Michael turned the discussion to a social product Google does currently offer: Orkut. To hear Mayer tell it, the service never caught on in the U.S. simply because it was far too slow after its initial launch.

Orkut launched in January of 2004, and as Mayer remembers it, it attracted “several million users in a few days“. This caused the network to slow down to a crawl, Mayer noted. And that, in turn, turned a lot of users away from it — at least in the U.S. “It’s all about speed here,” she said.

In Brazil, where Orkut is still dominant, it was a different story. Those users didn’t mind the slowness, Mayer said (though she didn’t elaborate as to why they didn’t care). As a result, it took off, and even today it’s still the dominant social network.

Mayer noted that it took a little bit of time, but eventually Google was able to scale Orkut for its traffic surge. But by then it was probably already too late in the U.S., Mayer indicated.

Michael kept trying to get Mayer to say that in Google’s effort to play catch up in social in the U.S. they should buy Twitter or even Facebook. Again, she wouldn’t do that. She gushed about Twitter (which she said she uses daily), and she said she thought Facebook has a different mentality than what Google is trying to do with social.

Mayer also said that Google remains committed to Orkut — at least in Brazil and India where again, it’s big. “We’re pretty happy with it,” she said.

As Orkut currently has over 52 million active users worldwide and over 34 billion pageviews each month it’s no surprise that “Bom Sabado” (“Good Saturday”) is currently trending on Google.

While neither Google or Orkut has responded to our inquiries on the extent of the virus or whether it is still happening, we’re hearing that the Orkut security team is trying to resolve the issue, and the best way currently to avoid the bug is to avoid Orkut entirely according to power user ghafoortabish who explains how to avoid the virus.

1. DO NOT visit any profile on Orkut till this script is blocked ( More preciously DO NOT use Orkut till this is blocked, as you can get affected by Flash scrpas posted on your SB too! )

2. Clear your cookies and cache right away and change your password and security question :

https://www.google.com/accounts/b/0/ManageAccount

3. Let your friends know about this script and make them aware of the situation. ( It’s just an effort to minimize the damage ).

Thanks: Comptalks

For all the grief Google gets for not understanding social networks, people often forget that it owns a pretty big one, Orkut. While Orkut is much smaller than Facebook worldwide, it does dominate in at least two large countries: Brazil and India. But that soon may change.

India looks like it is about to fall to Facebook. In May, 2010, Facebook attracted 18 million unique visitors in India, compared to Orkut’s 19.7 million (comScore). In the past year, Facebook grew 177 percent from 6.5 million Indian visitors, compared to 35 percent growth for Orkut. When the June numbers come out, Facebook may very well surpass Orkut in that country. Indeed, Google’s own Trends for websites shows Facebook edging out Orkut in India last month.

Facebook has been pouring a lot of resources into India, and is currently hiring 500 people there. It is a major global priority for the company. Brazil, however, is still safe for Orkut, with 29 million visitors a months versus only 8 million for Facebook.

But Google is no longer pinning its social networking hopes on Orkut. It has moved onto other things like cloning Facebook with its not-so-secret Google Me project. Well, it might not be a complete clone, if the ideas of one Google researcher are any indication.

SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, has raised $12 million in funding led by Globespan Capital Partners with existing investors Charles River Ventures and Helion Venture Partners participating in the round.

The latest capital injection brings SMS GupShup’s total funding to $37 million.

Launched in April 2007, SMS GupShup (spawned from Webaroo) serves 26 million users across India. The startup has seen rapid growth in users primarily due to the immense popularity of mobile devices in India. According to the startup, there are 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users. With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off. SMS GupShup currently processes over 480 million messages a month and accounts for 5 percent of all texts sent within India. The new funding will be used for expand into other markets such as the Philippines and Indonesia, for product development and to hire new staff in engineering, advertising and marketing.

In fact, the mobile social network has even attracted the attention of leaders in the space, like Facebook. Last year, Facebook partnered with SMS GupShup to powere and deliver its users’ status updates via text messages. And besides partnerships, SMS GupShup also has an advertising strategy. Over 100 advertisers currently run on the network including local insurance provider ICICI Lombard and international brands like Puma, Microsoft and Cadbury.

India is a huge market for social networks, with Facebook, Orkut and even Twitter vying for a share of the growing number of web users who are increasingly flocking to social networks in their day-to-day routines. But clearly, SMS GupShup has tapped into the mobile side of social networks and is seeing success from this in India. It should be interesting to see how SMS GupShup will fare in other countries. It seems that in developing countries where mobile phone usage is much highers than web-usage the service is sure to take off. But the question remains if the service could ever take off in Europe or the U.S., which seems to be Twitter territory.

Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.

The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly.

Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.

Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.

Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.

Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).

The civil case, which was filed in July 2006, related to hundreds of fake profiles for Barrichello that were created on Orkut, some of which depicted him as a toy turtle – I kid you not.

Earlier this week, Brazilian media published the outcome of the Sao Paulo court’s ruling, which ordered Google to compensate Barrichello half a million dollars in damages upfront and a daily fine of $590 until all the profile pages relating to the F1 driver were removed from the social network. Note: different media report different amounts.

Google told local reporters that it will always remove illegal content from Orkut but does not feel responsible for all other content that appears on there, and they don’t expect to have to police negative commentary about celebrities. Google can still appeal the case in higher court.

This isn’t the first time Google finds itself in Brazilian courts over Orkut.

On August 22, 2006, a Brazilian Federal Judge ordered Google to release Orkut user’s information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be using the social network to sell drugs and to be involved in child pornography. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information was turned over to the Brazilian government. Google back then stated that it would not release the information, on the grounds that the requested information is on Google servers in the U.S. and not in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to its national laws.

For what it’s worth, multi-millionaire Barrichello was looking for ‘respect rather than money’, and that he would be donating the money awarded to him in court to his non-profit organization Barrichello Kanaan Foundation. On Monday, the F1 driver tweeted a quote from Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (which I suspect was freely translated from his famous quote “There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self”).

My guess is he simply doesn’t like turtles.

(Via F1Planet)

Forgive us for not noticing sooner, but last week Google’s social network Orkut announced that it is rolling out a complete redesign. The new site is faster and, like every other social network these days, puts the activity stream front and center. Orkut has actually reduced the number of pages so that the most popular actions can all be done from the home stream. For instance, there is now in-line commenting for status updates, photos, and videos. And the various notifications (“friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements”) have all been consolidated onto the homepage as well.

Orkut also now has video chat, in addition to regular text IM. Access to other Google properties such as Gmail, maps, and search are now integrated at the top of the homepage. Profile pages are more customizable, and photo uploads are faster.

The changes come at a time when Orkut is seeing major encroachments by Facebook in its strongest markets of India and Brazil (despite its efforts to make it hard for Orkut users to switch).

Google’s social network definitely needs a refresh. In September, it attracted 51 million unique visitors across the world, down from 54.5 million in July, according to comScore. Facebook is about six times larger than Orkut worldwide, and even Twitter recently surpassed it with 58.4 million global visitors just to Twitter.com.

Can the stream save Orkut, or is it too late?

Hat tip to reader Anand Srinivasan

In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph.

We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

“Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file. Of course users can still export their friend lists in the CSV file. In addition, Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts. We support web standards such as OAuth and are working on ways to help users share their data more securely between social networks. We believe strongly that users own their data, and we’re committed to finding ways to make it easier for users to export data.”

Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t.

Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort.

It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t.

According to comScore, Facebook had over 92 million unique visitors in August 2009 in the United States. Orkut had around 972 thousand unique visitors. Now, it would be one thing for Facebook to simply port the tool over to the US — after all, they’ve already got the tool built. But the social network is actually advertising it to its users in the United States (the ad takes you to the Orkut friend finder). Seems a bit vicious, doesn’t it? Like sucking the last few drops of life out of something that’s on its way out anyway.

Thanks to Nick Gonzalez for the tip.

If that’s actually the case, here’s what I love about this:

1) Google says it was trying to add security features to improve Okrut Friends Export, yet it apparently didn’t bother to test the functionality after adding said feature. If they had, they would have immediately realized it was broken, like so many users did immediately. Google is a company meticulous about its testing of things, so that seems a bit odd.

2) The fact that Google would add additional security measures immediately following the revelation that Facebook had a tool it was promoting in India to allow users to easily import their Orkut friends is interesting. And by “interesting,” I mean suspicious. Does Facebook’s importing tool still work? Anyone in India, feel free to let us know in the comment.

I’m not saying this wasn’t, in fact, a bug. I’m just saying that the timing of said bug was interesting to say the least. And it certainly doesn’t seem like the usually careful Google cared very much about creating a bug that stopped the hemorrhaging of its Orkut users over to Facebook in India.

Sometimes “bugs” are convenient until you get called out on them. Just sayin’.

[photo: flickr/the consumerist]

And that’s not all. Previously, even without the tool, it was pretty easy to export you contacts from Orkut into a CSV (comma separated value) file. But that’s no longer working either. The option still exists on the Friends page in Orkut, but when you click on it, and fill in the CAPTCHA, it simply redirects you to Orkut’s main page.

Coincidence? Maybe. But we’ve already gotten emails from users in India who saw our post and rushed to try and export their friend data to escape Orkut, only to be shot down. And let’s not forget that Google and Facebook have been down a similar road before. Last year, Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect from accessing the data on its network. This led to a silly he said/she said spat in which the users were the losers. Could this be payback?

Facebook is undoubtedly increasingly interested in India not only because it is the largest social network in the world, but thanks to Facebook Lite, it’s much more accessible to a wide range of people. Orkut, meanwhile, is, well, a social network that Google seems to talk about as little as possible.

To test the friend export functionality tonight, I logged into my Orkut account for the first time in what must be years. I was shocked to find that there were other people I knew actually on it, that Google was recommending that I friend. So I sent a few requests out, and within minutes, this is the reply I got back (over email):

“what the f**k?”

The message behind that being, “why are you using Orkut?” For some people in India right now, sadly, it appears that they have no choice.

I wonder what Google’s Data Liberation team thinks about this? I have a feeling the official word we’ll get back from Google is “bug.” But given the timing and the fact that two different ways to export your friends broke at once, I’m not so sure that the word they’re really looking for isn’t “hypocrisy.”

Update: As expected, Google is calling this a “bug.” Still, there some interesting things about this “bug.” And it’s not yet clear if Facebook’s Orkut importing tool is working again.

With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.

This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut.

There are a couple of key factors that could be attributed to Orkut’s recent drop in visitors. First, in India, Facebook has been pushing out an aggressive campaign on its social network to get users to import their friends from Orkut with a special Orkut import tool. It basically lets them find friends on other social networks, like Orkut, who are also on Facebook and makes it easy to send a friend requests to those contacts. The purpose of the tool is to make it easy for users to quickly find new friends and establish their social presence on Facebook. The social network offers this in the U.S. for Gmail, AIM and other contact platforms. But this new tool in India is for Orkut specifically. Facebook users are also seeing is the Orkut contact importer in Brazil, Orkut’s home base and stronghold where Facebook is clawing for market share.

Another reason for Facebook’s growth in India could be the recent launch of Facebook Lite. India was one of the original target markets for the lightweight version of the social network, since it is particularly useful in developing countries where high speed Internet connections are sparse or non-existent.

Facebook has been eying India’s huge market and steadily adding features that help the social network establish its reach in the growing country. For example, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam, in May of this year.

It’s plainly obvious that Facebook is growing fast in India and could quite possibly overtake Orkut in the next few months. Meanwhile, other social networks are dropping like flies in the race; with Yahoo shutting down SpotM and MySpace considering layoffs in India because of the its lack of traction among users.

Yahoo India has decided to shut down SpotM, the social network it launched less than a year ago in India. According to the site, SpotM. which never exited private beta, will be shut down on Sep. 1. Yahoo launched SpotM as a social network for the 16-24 age bracket in an attempt to capture the growing market in India.

It appeared that SpotM had potential to take off due the popularity of social networks in India and the addition of a few differentiating features. Yahoo said that SpotM would allow users to make friends with other users and if they wanted, to make those friends private so other users wouldn’t know about the relationship. SMS integration with anonymous chat would let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number.

But it appears that SpotM couldn’t compete with other social networks that are dominating in India. Google’s Orkut is the leader in the space, with 16 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore stats. Facebook, which is growing incredibly fast in India, reached a high of 7.5 million unique visits in India, according to July’s comScore numbers. In May, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. Perhaps Yahoo is planning to focus its social networking efforts in other parts of the world with the recently launched Yahoo Meme.

Thanks to Ashish Sinha for the tip.

Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.

Using Alexa and Google Trend data, Cosenza color-coded the map based on which social network is the most popular in each country. All of the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still pockets of resistance in Russia (where V Kontakte rules), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).

Apparently, Alexa already thinks that Facebook is larger than MySpace in the United States. And Maybe it is, or maybe Cosenza’s isn’t using the best data. But I love being able to visualize market dominance on acountry-by-country basis. I wonder what the map would look like using comScore data, some of which can be found in our recent social network valuation model.

Below is an interactive version of the map.

We’ve now remodeled social network valuations based on current user numbers and Facebook’s most recent $10 billion valuation. The results are dramatically different.

Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.

The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).

We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.

We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.

Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.

The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.

The bottom line: If Facebook is worth $10 billion today, MySpace is worth just $6.5 billion. Bebo is worth $1.8 billion, Twitter is worth $1.7 billion and LinkedIn is worth $0.8 billion. Facebook also accounts for 37% of all social networking value points in our model. Another way of saying this: If Facebook is worth $10 billion, the value of the entire social networking industry is $27.1 billion.

Lots of charts and graphs below. The full model is here if you want to look at all the data (I recommend zooming unless you have super vision). Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for running the new model.

Year end Comscore numbers for the U.S. audience are out. The first thing we checked? How the major social networks are doing.

Facebook, which became the largest worldwide social network in mid 2008, is still playing catch up to MySpace in the U.S. They have 54.5 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore, compared to nearly 76 million for MySpace. But Facebook’s growth rate in the U.S. averaged 3.8% per month over the last twelve months. MySpace’s U.S. growth rate is 0.8% per month. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, but unless things change a lot, Facebook will overtake MySpace to become the largest social network in the U.S. in…2010.

At current growth rates Facebook will overtake MySpace in January 2010, a year from now. That is the month Facebook will reach 86 million U.S. users, compared to MySpace’s 84 million in January. Will this prediction be correct? Probably not, but it’s the best guess given today’s data.

It may actually take longer. Facebook’s growth rate had been increasing as the year wore on but dipped in December. As they get closer to MySpace it may become ever harder to catch up.

Also, even though Facebook is more than 2/3 the size of MySpace in the U.S. today, some key engagement metrics show more activity per user at MySpace. MySpace has almost two times the total time spent (17.5 billion minutes v. 9.3 billion minutes). MySpace generated 40 billion page views in December to Facebook’s 18 billion.

More data for other social networks is in the chart. Ning, starting from a smaller base, leads in overall growth rate, at 388% for the year and 14.1% monthly. Classmates is also growing quickly in the U.S. and had 16.6 million monthly unique visitors in December.

What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. WordPress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.

ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.

Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). Note on this list the stubborn persistence of Yahoo’s Geocities at No. 6, the rise of Yahoo’s Flickr at No. 7, Six Apart at No. 10, and the presences of Chinese sites like Baidu Space and 56.com. The real surprise, though, is document-sharing site Scribd at No. 16, with nearly 24 million worldwide uniques.

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. WordPress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

Here’s a screenshot of the actual data (as you can see, I rounded above):

I’ll admit it: I have a harder time remembering Orkut exists than I do remembering where I put my keys. Hell, I’ll probably forget about Orkut again as soon as I publish this post. That said, the fact that Google’s still fueling the project means some folks out there really love it; according to my indisputable Fact Checker 4000, most of these folks hail from Brazil or India.

Wherever you may be, Orkut fans, any of you running an S60 handset should hop on over to m.orkut.com. The Orkut S60 web interface has gotten a big ol’ revamp, adding photo uploads, picture galleries, click-to-call, and easier searching. It’s all done up in XHTML, so no client download is necessary.