iWeb Communities: Blog

December is an ideal moment to sum up what has been going for the past year, and see if there has been major changes on the web.

For iWeb customers and partners, apart from new web sites such as Facebook, or new technologies like Ruby On Rails, 2008 can also be remembered as an year of massive growth of Internet usage in Asian Countries. Here is an outline of the growth of major Internet service providers:

The graph comes from the Renesys blog where you can find more detailed figures, published just today. There are many things to get from the graphs, but one recurring pattern is that growth is mainly due to Asian Internet Providers, or international ISPs which received extra traffic from Asia: this is the case of Level 3, Global Crossing, NTT, Tata Communications, China Telecom, Asia Telecom, Korea Telecom, Japan’s SoftBank Telecom, Asia NetCom etc.

Meanwhile, american Internet service providers such as Sprint, Verizon or AT&T are losing ranks compared to last year.

Even more interesting is to see the current “Internet population” for each country:

The figures used for the graph were for June 2008; out of the top 20 countries, 8 of them are now from Asia. In the case of China, the country became first in terms of total Internet users at the beginning of this year, going past the United States.

If Internet usage is a clue for the economic activity of a given country, we can conclude that we have a preview here of the dominance of the Asian continent. Countries like China or Indonesia are experience both high economic and population growth, and will get past other countries in future years. Still, we won’t see in the near future North American users using Baidu (the chineese search engine) or visiting korean-language websites for work or for leisure.

What does that mean for webmasters? Here are possible outcomes that you should consider in your long-term plans:

• It might mean the end of the dominance of English in the next years on the Internet
• Internets within the Internet: we will see more web services targeting a specific cultural and geographic zone, which would be unknown by other “zones”. This is already the case of the Internet in Japan, South Korea or China
• Massive potential growth for webmasters who can provide localized versions of their website, in specific Asian regions.

Of course, translating Facebook or any other popular web service isn’t enough, and if you wish to develop websites for Asia, you’d also need to take into account local customs and local culture.