The report everyone is talking about today is Pingdom's "Social network popularity around the world." But while the debate continues over why Canada likes Facebook while the U.S. prefers MySpace, the real story is being overlooked: No two countries favor the same social network.

Pingdom's report, which is based on research using Google Insights for Search, uses a map to highlight relative popularity by search volume. It's obviously rough data. Pingdom breaks out each network by country where it's most popular:

• "Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada.
• Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines.
• LinkedIn is most popular in India.
• Twitter is most popular in Japan.
• LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States.
• Orkut is more popular in Iran (10th country popularity-wise) than it is in the United States.
• MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
• MySpace, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Twitter are the only social networks in this survey which have the United States in their top five countries, popularity-wise. That is just five out of twelve.

If you needed confirmation that social networks are global affairs, that should do it."

However, the data Pingdom uses shows exactly the opposite. With no social network leading across the globe, it appears that social networking isn't the great equalizer, bringing users together without respect to national boundaries, that many claim it to be. Rather, the world still segregates itself by region, congregating on social networks by geographic location (some by country, some by continent). There will always be wide distribution, but unless one or two social networks really break out of the current state they appear to be in, this separation by nation will most likely continue to proliferate with the exception of the early adopter and tech-centric crowds who use multiple networks to achieve a larger reach. Companies like MySpace and Facebook might want to concentrate efforts on buying or partnering with other social networks to increase global reach instead of pushing into countries and trying to compete with established players.

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