I have said before that the web, while global, really is at its best when it works local. Google (independently) thought along the same lines and have made it their mission to provide targeted, personalized, localized search results. They know that this is what delivers value for the majority of practical searches.

Just because the web is everywhere it does not mean it is the same everywhere or that it is used in quite the same way everywhere. Take social networking for instance. Facebook, with its 500 million plus users, is the undisputed king of the social networks at the moment. But it is having to learn valuable lessons regarding locality and web culture.

When you change languages, for instance, much of what makes sense in one does not easily translate to the other. Google found that out when it created its social network – Orkut. Created a by a Turkish Google Engineer Orkut has less than 3% of the online population in the USA yet it has almost half the population of Brazil and India making it a powerful social marketing vehicle for those countries.

The name itself probably has a lot to do with its popularity in those countries in the first instance. What sounds like a weird five-letter word to western ears is decidedly less so and the immediate response is translated into large membership numbers.

Facebook is still young as a network. It is just now beginning to learn this lesson by facing its first major, resistant market: Japan.

Japanese culture has different dictates and when it comes to the web these translate in a lot less directness and even less transparency in places than Facebook imposes upon its users. This and the fact that Facebook is thoroughly western in approach have resulted in a very lukewarm uptake of the social network in the home of the rising sun.

The lesson here is a basic one: understand your target audience before you even start to market to them.