I’ve written a lot about Facebook, which is wildly popular in the United States. But as Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation at the State Department, noted in an interview with Kojo Nnamdi that I blogged about in a previous post, Americans tend to focus on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook because they’re popular here. To be sure, those companies have a global presence, but sometimes they’re not the main site in other countries. For example, Brazil’s population has adopted Google’s Orkut as its main social networking site over Facebook.

Steve Hamm has an article in Business Week talking about the latest social networking site with global ambitions, XIHA Life:

Launched last year, the site was designed from the ground up by a young Finn living in China, Jani Penttinnen, to be multilingual and to bridge between languages and cultures. Users submit content or chat in their own languages and other people can translate the discrete chunks using Google’s translation technology, which is deeply embedded in the site. Today, the site has 600,000 registered users from 208 countries (No country accounts for more than 5% of the total traffic) and about 1 million unique visitors per month. Small, yes, but it’s only a year old. Penttinnen, a soft spoken guy with an elfin persona, has ambitious growth targets: 5 million in the next year and 30 million in the next five years.

This site has great potential in its globalocity. But it’s not for everyone. It’s a magnet for people who see themselves as global citizens or who want to reach across the national chasms. (A group that’s about 70% female.) For some, the site offers the possibility of developing online pen pals. For others, it’s mostly about reaching out to people in places where they’re planning to travel or where they’re temporarily working to get the skinny on what they should see and do. A smaller group is hooking up with people willing to help them learn a foreign language. “We try to get and keep the ‘right’ people—the people who are focused on our themes,” says Penttinen. To help steer things in the right direction, he’s rounding up a network of expats who will produce high-quality blogs about their experiences—in exchange for small fees….

By the way, xiha means “fun” or “happy” in Mandarin and “Hip-Hop” in Cantonese.

Speaking of Chinese, the State Department recently launched pages on two leading social networks portals in China, Kaixin Wang and QQ, to coincide with President Obama’s travel to China and other countries in Asia.

Here’s more about the effort from the State Department blog, Dipnote:

Our collaboration with these sites uses local platforms in Chinese to communicate directly with the Chinese people. We hope that this outreach will facilitate our ability to share information and promote a dialogue at the grassroots level. The launch is part of our comprehensive new media effort to support President Obama’s first visit to the region.

Our blog page on QQ will provide details about the President’s events during his visit. In addition, we will share ground-level perspectives from embassy personnel as events unfold.

Our Kaixin page (similar to Facebook) will strike a more informal tone, catering to a core demographic of educated white collar workers. Our goal is to keep content fresh to meet the demands of a young Chinese audience accustomed to accessing meaningful information online. Following the visit, the embassy will continue to use these new outreach tools to connect with the Chinese online community and share both formal and informal sides of our Mission in China.

The QQ page includes a video greeting from Jon Huntsman Jr., U.S. Ambassador to China. Huntsman, a Mormon who served his LDS mission in Taiwan, speaks in Mandarin and English. This is what he says in the English portion:

On social networking sites there are no geographic or physical barriers. It’s a great way to communicate and to better understand each other. Mutual understanding between our people is critically important. It provides the basis for cooperation on the many global challenges we face. We hope to keep our web page content fresh and interesting including some behind-the-scenes insights and we hope you will write in and let us know what you think. We will listen to your ideas and respect and consider your suggestions. We will have our differences to be sure, but I’m confident there will be more areas of agreement and cooperation.