The Dominican Republic is a small country located within the Carribean Sea. It borders the country of Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. Making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries.Both by area and population, the Dominican Republic is the second largest Caribbean nation (after Cuba), with 48,442 square kilometers (18,704 sq mi) and an estimated 10 million people. Inhabited by Taínos since the 7th century, the territory of the Dominican Republic was reached by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and became the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, namely Santo Domingo, the country's capital and Spain's first capital in the New World. The Dominican Republic has went through many trials and tribulations from Spanish rule, to strife with the French and Haitians, civil war, dictatorship briefly during the sixties, which was ended in the mid-sixties due to U.S.-led intervention. The country now is under representative democracy led by Leonel Fernandez much past 1996. Like most all the other countries in the world The Dominican Republic has also been bitten by the social networking bug. The social networking phenomenon is taking over the world country by country and the Dominican Republic is no an exception, with Facebook and Hi5 in its top 10 of most visited websites. According to Vincenzo Cosenza, the man behind Vincos Blog, focusing on the topics of social networking, social media and photography, Facebook is the most popular social networking site in 100 out of 127 countries, reaching over 350 million users across the planet. Cosenza recently published an interactive World Map of Social Networks that uses analyzed data from Google Trends for Websites to visually depict the most popular social networks by country.
The map was first published in June 2009, when Facebook had more than 200 million users and was the most popular network in most places in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States. The updated map shows Facebook's continuing trend of global domination.
Non-English speaking parts of the world have been "colonized" by the Facebook takeover, and rival social networks such as Orkut (India), Hi5 (Cameroon, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua), Maktoob (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Yemen), Cyworld (South Korea), Lide (Czech Republic) and Skyrock (Guadeloupe and Martinique) have been almost all but replaced by Facebook. Some regions that have not been taken over include Russia and Kazakhstan (where social network V Kontakte dominates), China (where social network QQ is the market leader), Mongolia, Thailand, Peru, Romania and Portugal (where Hi5 is the dominant social network), and in Brazil and Estonia (where Orkut is the leading social network). The national flower is that of the West Indian Mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni). The national bird is the Cigua Palmera or Palmchat (Dulus dominicus).
The Dominican Republic has become the Caribbean's largest tourist destination; the country's year-round golf courses are among the top attractions. In this mountainous land is located the Caribbean's highest mountain, Pico Duarte, as is Lake Enriquillo, the Caribbean's largest lake and lowest elevation. Quisqueya, as Dominicans often call their country, has an average temperature of 26 °C (78.8 °F) and great biological diversity.
Music and sport are of the highest importance in Dominican culture, with merengue as the national dance and song and baseball the favorite sport.
Internet Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominican_Republic
http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/technology/2009/12/27/34314/Social-networks-take-over-the-world-Dominicans-are-no-exception
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