It's pretty geared towards Japanese cultural norms, from what I've read and what my own Japanese friends have told me. I don't think it would be as acceptable

It's pretty geared towards Japanese cultural norms, from what I've read and what my own Japanese friends have told me. I don't think it would be as acceptable as it is here to meet someone briefly through a friend and then add them the next day on facebook, for instance. It's an interesting barrier towards global adoption, methinks; it's like how neither Google nor Yahoo can beat Baidu in mainland China, because Baidu just understands what its audience wants better. But, I think that a social networking platform is going to struggle a lot more with adapting to cultural norms than information search is.