... see, I live en Denmark, Europe, and sure, we have our own stuff here, but that really doesn't matter on greater scope of things. There aren't even any big European networks with the scope etc. of lets say Facebook. So naturally you look to the US if you want to be part of something bigger on the web.

But as a European of cause it's frustrating you always have to turn to US-orientated networks and services. Cause thats what they are: MySpace, Facebook, Wordpress.com, even YouTube, Twitter etc.; they're US-orientated. They're made in America to serve the Americans. It usually takes quite a long time before a l18n/l10n-project gets started. And thats pretty sad, because by that time the hype is over.

It's really scary that almost nobody I know have ever heard of Twitter and flickr...! And they're not dumb; they just live in a country that don't speak English.

Since May 2007 when BizToo was launched, the global market has become a smaller place. BizToo.com, a business networking website, has members in North America, Asia and Europe, with representatives from almost ten different countries.

It is anticipated that BizToo.com will become the Facebook of the business world. Already members have begun to network, and to even form their own groups.

I guess I'm in the middle of the bell curve as to when I hop on board.

My question is, could a company come along and do what DogPile did for search but for social networking?

I know it's more complicated than that, but has this been tried or talked about seriously?

Chuck, not sure I grok your question: "could a company come along and do what DogPile did for search but for social networking?" Can you clarify?

a) translation - you'd be lucky if you could find someone who would translate it free or very low cost. Say you pick some of the top languages and go for that, say Chinese, Hindi, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese (just for argument's sake, none are better than the others). First, how can you really tell if you have a decent translation if you don't speak the language? Second, there may be costs involved and is your funder of CFO going to allow you to justify your limited funds for such efforts?

b) cultural differences - let alone factors of Hebrew and Chinese and other Asian characters reading differently and transposing on the screen, localization is not something that is an immediate benefit to a start-up that needs to get launched asap, esp in the volatile market where a few months can make or break the launch, there are differences of culture such as UPS's issue with showing a woman with a short sleeved shirt - didn't go over too well in the Arabic countries.

c) marketing in the areas that speak those languages. Again leaving out the pure cost factor of marketing itself, how do you even know what the marketing market is like there, how do you measure it, is it worth taking the risk with your limited funds to take the risk?

d) interaction between languages - will the sites interact? If I don't speak German or Spanish, and others vice versa, I will probably have little to no interaction with them. Thus creating basically silos within the network with language as the barrier. We know on the fly translation softwares are still pretty crappy.

Remember, we're talking about companies without huge marketing budgets. Now maybe MySpace (now) and some of the funded companies may have some marketing budget to put aside for this, but they probably weren't thinking too much about localization when they built their original systems, so chnages will probably have to be made.

So what's the solution? Most go for where they know and can reach the market best.

The impression I gained is that cultural differences thrive - a good thing!

Here in Australia, Myspace is king.