social networking

More and more Web 2.0 start-ups are running into a surprising problem: too many customers.Make that too many customers in the wrong countries.Although the Internet is a global medium, U.S. companies, which drive the vast majority of online advertising spending, shun users in many foreign countries.San Francisco social-networking service Friendster highlights what's happening. While Friendster's user numbers are rising -- 15 percent alone in the last three months -- 22 percent of its users are from the Philippines, another 22 percent live in Malaysia, 20 percent are in Singapore and 12 percent live in Indonesia, according to Alexa, which provides information on Web traffic.Launched in 2004 from Google's Mountain View headquarters, Orkut now receives 71 percent of its users from Brazil.