comScore did a study on the expansion of social networking across the globe, revealing that several sites have experienced dramatic growth during the past year but also disclosed that that certain sites dominate in certain regions. The whole point of social networking is that everyone (who’s anyone) is on the same site(s) or else they wouldn’t be much good for communication.

Social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72-percent increase versus year ago. Facebook.com experienced even stronger growth during that same time frame, jumping 270 percent to 52.2 million visitors. Bebo.com (up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors) and Tagged.com (up 774 percent to 13.2 million visitors) also increased by orders of magnitude.

We are used to hearing about MySpace and Facebook, ad nauseum, but we often forget that these are primarily popular only in North America. Both MySpace.com (62 percent) and Facebook.com (68 percent) attract approximately two-thirds of their respective audiences from North America.

But Bebo.com has a particularly strong grasp on Europe, attracting nearly 63 percent of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is firmly entrenched in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent). Friendster also attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region.

While not really into “social networking” I have a Friendster page put up largely under duress and now desperately in need of updating. But it would be interesting to know what the most popular social networking site in Japan is currently?

Since edojin says most Japanese do not treat Japan to be part of Asia, perhaps it isn’t Friendster at all? Earlier this year Kaishin reported on the SNS war heating up in Japan — especially MySpace taking on Mixi — but has a clear winner emerged as yet?