That world exist, and right now as I'm typing this, a very late evening in the UK, they are getting ready for the morning sun to peek up any moment if it hasn't already. Yes, I'm talking east, I'm talking Asia (and if you're in the UK you might call it "The Orient"). They have the above scenario already. They had it yesterday and they will most probably have it tomorrow, and things that we take for granted both from a social and commercial perspective might not even register as a blip on their radar over there.

Social Networks
I just read this interesting article which highlights things that we might not think of by default in US/Europe. For example it teaches us that despite Facebook, with it's 60 million users, is nowhere near QQ in the Asian markets. QQ has a mind boggling 300 million users. At work our Asian offices did a campaign on QQ (for a client which is famous for many things, but also for MP3 players and lately a cool phone) which had an uptake of 50 million people actively using their little MP3 players with their QQ avatars within the QQ community. 50 million!!

Search Engine
If your pages doesn't turn up amongst the first results in Baidu chances are you are missing out on a rather large group of possible users. Baidu isn't just a threat to Google in China, but the roles are the other way around: Google is, somewhat, a distant threat to Baidu, however Baidu is safely holding on to about 66% of the Chinese market, where Google has about 26%. Imagine that dear westerner! If you start multiplying that with population you quickly realise that the Chinese search engine is absolutely massive when it comes to user base (and therefore potential revenue streams).

…and of course:
Oh yes, as for the that phone mentioned in the first paragraph: as it currently only has English as its input language the appeal for it on the Asian markets is limited at best (right now), which also would be the reason why no attempts have been made to get into that market just yet.

Now, all of this is of course "obvious" when we think about it, and when I travel to Asia I'm pretty prepared for all kinds of cultural differences, but at those times I'm mainly thinking about religions, food and…umm…BIG things. It of course makes sense that there are differences in online usage as well, and it isn't surprising that we in Europe/US perhaps not are thinking about them daily (as I'm sure I'm not alone in the UK having problems reading Chinese and Japanese web sites).

Still, at times the world seems like a really small place…and at other times it seems quite big indeed. Hmm. Should probably go to bed.