While Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the world’s number one social networking site by widening their global reach, other social networks have more significant regional strangleholds that will be hard to crack. For example, Orkut is weak in much of the world but dominant in Brazil.

The most glaring example of this regional favoritism my be in Asia, where Friendster remains the top dog and isn’t abdicating its advantage anytime soon. With many complaints about the site having been addressed, and the rapidly emerging connectivity of Asia’s nearly 4 billion residents, Friendster is a much ignored behemoth in social networking.

According to comScore, Friendster has increased its monthly unique visitors from 23 million in April last year to around 40 million this year, with the vast majority of new visitors coming from the Asia-Pacific region. Friendster doubled Facebook and MySpace in April for unique hits in Asia, and tripled Hi5 and Orkut.

Moreover, Friendster’s Asian users aren’t just fooling around: they spent an average of 229 minutes a month on the site, the highest of any social network.

Why does Friendster dominate in Asia? According to VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon (in a really excellent article), much of it has to do with the early days of Friendster’s development in the Bay Area, where the large Asian population embraced the social network and brought in overseas friends. 23% of an Asian users’ friends are from a different country. Chinese speakers not in their own country prefer Friendster as the social network to connect back home with.

Eldon goes on to speculate about a potentially lucrative income model for the site: virtual goods. Asian gamers and virtual world users have shown a willingness to spend a good deal of money on these items, and Friendster’s domination amongst users already predisposed to this type of spending will make it a viable profit model they simply can’t ignore exploiting.

Watch out for Friendster. Demographics, usefulness, and earning models all look quite positive, and they’ve settled down after some turbulent times.

Story via Eric Eldon at VentureBeat.

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