Germans Love David Hasselhoff/New Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The social networking site Friendster, while long-dead here in North America and subject to Anyone Remember Pogs?-style jokes by The Onion, is the Friending Network in large parts of East and Southeast Asia. The top five countries using Friendster are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and the US.
    • Which leads to an aversion: While Friendster is used in the Philippines so much, Myspace gets rarely used or mentioned there, despite the ability of its users to befriend celebs there.
  • Orkut, out of all the possible countries, is very popular in India, Estonia and especially Brazil. In fact, Google's social networking site, became so popular among Brazilians within a year of its launch that the American users fled. A few years later, Orkut headquarters were moved to Brazil. It's one of the most popular websites on the internet, but largely unknown in its country of origin, where its parent company is a household name.
  • Another social networking site, Hi5, is based on California yet around 80% of its users live outside the U.S. For a while it was the most popular social network in Latin America, Portugal and Thailand (though the rise of Facebook has severely reduced its popularity in some of those countries). Currently they're trying to turn the site into a "social gaming" platform.
  • Fotolog, despite being headquartered in New York City, is extraordinarily popular in Spain and South America, to the point the Argentinian equivalent of Emo/scene fashion is known as the "Flogger".
    • Not fashion anymore. As Facebook and Reggaetón started to gain more and more acceptance in Argentina, and a few violent episodes covered by the media involving Floggers, starting in March 2009 (end of summer vacations) Flogger fashion started to lay down quietly.
  • The lesser meme "Leekspin" has become a major Runet (Russian Internet) meme under the name "Yak tsup tsop" in 2006. Subsequently, the song itself ("Ievan Polkka") and its performers (the Finnish band "Loituma") became extremely popular, too, resulting in fansites, cover-versions, ringtones, etc. Orihime Inoue, who was featured in the original flash animation, became something like a symbol of the whole yak-tsup-tsop craze; and (due to most Russians not knowing who Orihime in fact was) was considered a made-up character and nicknamed "Ieva" (after the song's main heroine). There even were some Rule 34 pics of "Ieva" (not Orihime!). Orihime is sometimes referred to as the "Loituma Girl" as well.
    • Similarly, both leekspin and caramelldansen have gone on to be major memes in Japan, with the former leading to Miku Hatsune often being drawn holding a leek, and the latter leading to a wide variety of custom versions of the original caramelldansen gif, which triggered a second, larger wave of popularity in America. In fact, people who didn't know had to be told that the song was Swedish, NOT Japanese.
      • Caramelldansen videos are now an Ascended Meme due to the original band making an official music video to the Speedycake remix in which they are all depicted as animesque characters doing the very dance that originated from the meme. Warning, Uncanny Valley material in the video.
  • The instant messaging protocol ICQ, though popular in the late 90s, fell out of favor along with the company that had purchased it, America Online. However, this is not the case Germany, Russia, and the rest of Eastern Europe where it equals instant messaging itself. Indeed, since April 2010, the rights to ICQ have been held by Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies.
  • British YouTube user xBextahx somehow became very popular in Japan, where she is known as Beckii Cruel.
    • There's also Magibon, a Pennsylvanian twenty-something with a propensity for staring at the camera who's practically become a celebrity in Japan.
  • When an American father named Allen Rout posted a picture of his newborn baby on his website, he'd never realize years later that it'd blow up into a Memetic Mutation in Japan.
  • For unclear reasons, LiveJournal is the most popular host for Russian-language bloggers, to the point where the Russian term for blogging is derived from the Russian name of LiveJournal. A Russian company now owns the site, a number of high-profile Russian politicians maintain LJs, Russian authors used LJ to publish excerpts or teasers for their new books, and it's even been theorized that the DDoS attacks on the site in April 2011 were caused by the Russian government in order to silence a critical blogger. LiveJournal is Serious Business in Russia.
  • eBay knockoff Yahoo! Auctions quickly faded away everywhere except Japan, where it is by far the most popular site of its kind.
  • Omegle has quite a few Indian users.
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