To be clear, it's not a "dig" at international users. To speak from personal experience, the site that I was founder/CEO of earlier in my career, imeem, was wi

To be clear, it's not a "dig" at international users. To speak from personal experience, the site that I was founder/CEO of earlier in my career, imeem, was wildly popular in the Philippines and Thailand. At peak, we were a top 20 site in the Philippines, according to Alexa. We spent a lot of time adding country-specific filters to music charts, comments, etc once tagalog and thai started seeping into every page of the site. We loved our foreign users, but from an advertising business perspective, a user in southeast asia is worth a small fraction of a US or UK user. The relative low value of developing country users to brand advertisers is the primary reason sites like Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, etc ended up in the place they are. It's not a question of nationalism, it really does boil down the what the advertising market is willing to pay. This is one additional factor re:why ad-supported social platforms end up with mis-aligned incentives w/users...