Honor Gunday is marking this week with an important observation: He is getting friend requests from heavy Zurna users and he thinks this is very bad news for Facebook.
Honor is the founder of Zurna, a Turkish social network. Like many other Turkish social networks, Zurna is home to a group of male users (whom we call Apaches here at Mondus) who tend to be extremely aggressive towards other users especially women.
As Honor analyzes in his two blog posts, Facebook now has over 1 million Turkish users. Facebook is now the second highest-traffic website in Turkey, and Turkey provides Facebook with 3.8% of its global traffic, as the fourth hightest usage country (after th US, Canada and the UK). These first 1m or so users aremostly elite Turks. However, with the site's enormous popularity, it is now starting to spill outside of this 20% elite population. Honor goes on:
As it seems so far, Facebook currently has attracted the top 20% of the
population which also speaks English. If Facebook decides to launch a
localized Turkish version of the site, the uneducated 80% will start to
infiltrate the site, especially the men, who come from traditional
hijab-wearing households with oppressed women, will start messaging the
girls with obscene or unacceptable messages, leading to the exodus of
the creme de la creme; with nobody (or no respectable girls) remaining
on the site to message locally, then in the next stage, the Americans
and Europeans will start getting random messages from these Turkish
guys, leading to a linguistic and social armageddon. And that’s when
Facebook becomes like Orkut.
Honor also says that he could observe this phenomenon on Orkut, where once the Brazilians arrived in hordes (incidentally, the word horde comes from the Turkish word "ordu", meaning army), they drove all other traffic away. There's a group in Facebook called, "Don't let Facebook get localized to Turkish", so it seems that some Turkish users are afraid of the same thing.
This will be interesting to watch. Mondus is the closest thing to a Turkish Facebook, with tight-privacy, high-trust local social networking features. We are keen to see how the Turkish invasion of Facebook develops.
UPDATE: Check out this screenshot recently captured from the Turkey network homepage. The language 
on the wall would make a sailor blush!
Cem Sertoğlu (Moderatör) - Mondus.net Chief Executive Officer - SP Ventures, Managing Partner
