Top Web Apps in Latvia
Latvia is a small country in Northern
Europe, next to Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus. It has a population of 2.3
million, around 38% of whom have Internet access. The ethnicity of the population
(Latvians 60%; Russian 30%) is reflected in the small internet market, because most local
web sites and apps have 2 versions - Latvian and Russian. Following is an overview of the
most popular web apps in Latvia. The information in this post was supplied by Maksim.
Social networks
Draugiem.lv is the most popular web site in Latvia. Originally it was built on the Friendster model, but now it includes services like music and video - so it is more like MySpace these days.
One.lv is the fifth most popular site in Latvia - it's mostly popular in the russian community. draugiem.lv (above) is mostly made up of latvians.
Klase.lv, Orb.lv and http://amigos.inbox.lv/ are smaller social networks. But generally because the market is so small, most users frequent the popular web SNS like draugiem.lv and One.lv.
Digg clone
Digg.lv is a Latvian digg-like site, based on the open source Pligg CMS. It's popular amongst bloggers and features mostly tech-related news. Note that they even managed to secure the digg domain in Latvia (which I would guess violates digg.com's copyright??).
Youtube clones
Latvija.tv and Mansvideo.lv are the two main ones. As you can see below, Latvija.tv is almost identical to YouTube.
Search
Google is the second most popular site in Latvia and in the search niche it is dominant. Domestic searches like siets.lv and smart.delfi.lv are not very well used.
Photos
Del.icio.us clone
Online Classifieds
ss.lv (similar to craigslist)
Portals
Delfi.lv was the first old style portal in Latvia. It is primarily a news site and has a Russian version at rus.delfi.lv.
Apollo.lv and tvnet.lv are also popular portals in Latvia.
Inbox.lv is the most popular web mail service in Latvia and practically alone in this niche, for this language. Perhaps this is why Google is promoting Gmail on its Latvia search page (see screenshot above). Some of the portals also have mail services, but they are not so popular.
Blogs
Klab.lv, six.lv and blogiem.lv are the top blogging platforms.
Bloggers
The highest ranking Latvian bloggers are listed on this page: six.lv/rank. Maksim's blog is ranked number 1, with an overall Technorati rank of 9,549.
Summary
It's fascinating how every country we cover has Digg, YouTube, etc clones. Digg is especially clone-able it seems (incidentally a New Zealand digg clone has just been released).
Many thanks to Maksim for all the great info and screenshots. This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia.
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What about an Israel sites review?
Great job you're doing with this series Richard, looking forward to many more markets ;)
A few notes.
Notable fact IMHO is that Draugiem.lv has more than 800,000 registered users. It is not a small number for a social networking site that originated in country with under million Internet users. Draugiem.lv has English version (Frype.com) too.
About blogging platforms. Klab.lv runs under localized version of LiveJournal software and has more than 10,000 registered users. Six.lv is powered by WordPress MU, but Blogiem.lv has it's own original software.
Wow, very interesting for me as an exchange student. Will have to go check some pages out I didn't knew before. :-)
Several websites were not mentioned:
Under Photos: foto.inbox.lv, currently the largest photo sharing site in Latvia (also allows sharing of videos); and myfoto.lv, with unlimited photo storage;
Under Online Classifieds: reklama.lv is leading classifieds website, with ss.lv being the second one.
According to the latest TNS/Gallup report (2006-4), Inbox.lv is #2 in terms of unique weekly visitors (with Google being #1), being the largest Latvian portal made in Latvia.
Richard, are you interested in Bulgaria?
Thanks for the extra facts Kristaps and viktors.
John, yes Israel definitely deserves a review. And Dimitar, yes please send me info on Bulgaria if you have it.
Best of the Best
Best of the Best 2
Great with these "country reviews".
Keep up the good work.
Lets have some more, please.
Agreed
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Interestingly enough, the author of this article has squeezed all possibilities to advertise himself and his blog. Not only he "forgot" to mention that six.lv (according to which his own blog journal.lv is the top blog) was also created by himself, but also he fails to analyze Latvian "blogoshpere", because he's Russian not Latvian.
Online Classifieds also www.postit.lv similar to ss.lv but with more features.
There is also dictionary Latvian-English-Russian and 17 other languages:
www.wikiled.com
Do not forget about dating service :-)
I am from the USA and have heard many stories about the Latvia women are looking to come to the USA to meet the right man i am one of those people that is looking for a nice woman to speak to then meet and hopefully have a long term relationship with so what are the best websites to meet women from Latvia that i can understand in English Thank you