The launch was the silent type: nobody heard about it

Jan 21, 2008 11:11 GMT  ·  By

When you're most bored and have nothing to do, you start surfing the Internet and in particular the social networks in order to see how your friends have been doing. I don't know if that's the way it works for you, it does for me. And while merrily browsing through my account on MySpace, I just chanced upon the International Map and noticed that it was in Russian. That was new, so I decided to ask around about when that had happened and surprisingly nobody knew exactly, but it wasn't there for long.

Apparently, the next version to be launched is the one for Turkey, as it was mentioned on Webrazzi.com yesterday. The offices are in place and the interviewing is going on right now, so it must be in the final stages before the release. Travis Katz, MySpace's Managing Director of International, has told Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com that Turkey makes a great target because 30 percent of its population is 18 and under, exactly the site's target audience.

It's a bit surprising that the Russian version has been launched just now, seeing as the populace of it is a huge one, worthy of a first pick when it comes to new offices being opened. Turkey, on the other hand, is a different cup of tea. Facebook has jumped about 48 positions in the traffic rankings in the Muslim country, in the past 4 months, and now it is on the second spot, a huge leap. MySpace looks like it must have been forced to come here if it wanted to catch FB's trail.

As one user on a forum wrote, "MySpace Turkey - the jokes will write themselves." The ever growing battle between the two largest social networks is taking over the entire world, but as far as I can see, it has a clear winner: Facebook. Its rate of growth is similar to Google's and look how far the Mountain View based company has come.