Web 2.0 outside the USA

The other day I wondered if there were any good or even popular web 2.0 companies outside of the USA. Just too often I, and probably also many other people, associate the internet and generally the computer world with US companies. Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Ebay and AOL are household names around the globe. Those companies seem to represent everything that deals remotely with computers and the internet.

And in the new and exciting web 2.0 world? Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, Bloglines,…? All prominent US based companies which were acquired by other even more prominent US companies.

But on closer inspection you can easily find companies outside the USA that are both popular and worth your attention. Four examples:

The startpages market seems to become a European predominance: There are Germany based Pageflakes and its French competitor Netvibes. Although the big market players like My Yahoo and Google Personalized Homepage have by far more users and a wider reach, Pageflakes and Netvibes seem to be more flexible and, based on the look and functionality of their respective sites, technologically advanced. Another plus on their part are user participation like the Netvibes Ecosystem and countless translations to other languages. Both companies should be able to survive, a solid business plan provided.

Music on the web? Tagging tunes? Creating user groups? Custom radio? Recommend your favourite tunes and artists to others? Of course, I am talking about Last FM which is a British company and a prime example of a social networking site. You can easily spend hours on the site listening to tunes and discovering new artists. You can join groups that share a similar taste in music or you can even start your own group and have group charts if enough users have joined.
I don’t know any other service that provides similar features as Last FM. If you know one (or even more) tell me, please.

Another service worth mentioning is openBC, a Germany based social networking site specialising in business contacts and recommendations. Its US counterpart is Linked In. The services are about networking, jobs,… Basically a more advanced, electronic business card. But since I am not registered on either site I can’t write much about them. Just search for reviews on the net if you want to find out more.
openBC will become Xing, though. So don’t get confused.

A good start to find out what’s going on in certain countries is Read/Write Web’s country series. They have features on Austria, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, France, Poland, India, Korea, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Russia, China and Japan. The lists are not complete in any way but provide a decent overview. But be prepared to find clones of Digg, Facebook or Flickr.