Archive for December, 2010

What’s with the Indonesians?

Back in May of this year, Yahoo! acquired an Indonesian geo-social startup called Koprol.  Koprol was pretty much unheard of on the geo-social apps landscape.

Yahoo! made the acquisition through their franchisee, Yahoo! Southeast Asia, after Koprol won a Yahoo! Developer Day in Jakarta.

Since May, Koprol has really taken off in Indonesia, now reporting over 1 million users, which puts it in #2 place against FourSquare’s reported 3 5 million users.

Koprol is now also the #3 social network in Indonesia after Twitter and Facebook:

http://www.koprolblog.com/2010/11/3rd/

At Locle we had already noticed that there was something special about Indonesia in relation to geo-social.  Without any advertising or promotion of Locle in the Indonesian market, and without any translation or localization, 15% of Locle’s users were from Indonesia.

We know that Indonesia is a big country.  With 240 million people, it’s the fifth most populous. 

So what is it about Indonesians?  We think it’s to do with mobile vs PC usage.  A significant proportion of the population only have mobile phone access to the internet.  But we also think it has something to do with the way Indonesians socialise.  As a predominantly Muslim, yet liberal country, geo-social networking seems to fit well with their way of life.

It’ll be interesting to see what other countries turn out to be surprise geo-socialisers!