MySpace France Launches Today

MySpace France will go live today .The French site is at fr.myspace.com . MySpace France was launched in August 2006 and was at the beta period till now .Pete Cashmore of mashable feels that the significance of MySpace France is that it competes against Skyblog, the undisputed champion of the French blogging scene. Skyblog is owned by French radio station Skyrock, and has its own plans to expand across Europe and even launch a US version. The question is whether MySpace, which had 1.3 million uniques in France in November compared to 7 million unique visitors* to Skyblog, can make any progress there. Or the bigger question: can any social network cross language barriers and cultures to become big outside of its home market? The progress of Asian sensation Cyworld in the US market should also help to answer that question.
MySpace UK is the company’s most successful European service, but it seems to lag behind Bebo by most measures. Meanwhile, MySpace also has beta sites in Ireland, Spain, Germany and Italy - the German site will launch officially in the next few weeks. Outside of Europe, they have the newly launched MySpace Japan, MySpace Australia and plans to launch MySpace China. It’s certainly worthwhile for MySpace to expand globally, but I doubt they’ll be able to topple the dominant local players - Americans use MySpace because everybody else uses it, and that’s surely the case in countries where other sites are dominant.
It would be interesting to see if MySpace can indeed cross the cultural divide and become big in other countries .If MySpace hopes to replicate its success in United States it has got to do a lot of research on local cultures and Local demographics .Think Local act global should be its guiding goal.