Let's have a look to it :
- First, Africa is by far lagging behind in terms of internet penetration and therefore statistical updates are quite impossible. With the exception of Northern arabic african countries and South Africa, most of the continent is showing the world that pauverty is also caused by digital gap : no access no information is one of main cause and consequence to pauverty. In our globalized world, African governments should fight, next to already known "diseases" (corruption, health system, education system,...) to give access to their citizens to the digital world and its information content. Social networks could have a major influence on allowing Africa to massively catch up with the gap. But of course, Maslow's pyramid has already shown us that culture, information and technology come by far after basic needs such as food, water, education and health.
- Secondly, China, Russia Japan, and Brazil (but for how long ?) are momently keeping out of the Facebook leadership. Russia and China have set up their own social networks some years ago and we may consider that political aspects next to language barriers are involved here, when trying to keep away social giant away from their markets. Nevertheles one may consider, as it was the case for India or Mongolia, that local owned social networks will not cope with Facebook continuous market share progress. A particular mention for Brazil, where Google's network Orkut is still leading the market, with over 36 millions visitors/month. Facebook is even ranking only 3rd, behind Windows Live (source : Comscore). Notably, Orkut is showing a socio-demo profile quite different from Facebook's one, with a majority of younger people addicted to Google's SN there.
Japan shows also a particular trend, due to the high consumption of mobile traffic overthere. Mixi, the most popular social network offers a mobile and 'game' oriented content, which compares to more 'content' oriented networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
As conclusion, we may think that the map shown here will most probably evolve in the next 6 months to a even more 'blue' one, as Facebook mobile features (such as Places) will grow in popularity and penetration (e.g. would be key in Japan for instance) and with a globalization trend that will push further to countries still based on local initiatives... Over the last 12 months, Poland, Netherlands or Mongolia have lost the battle against Palo Alto's social network king...
