Glad to hear you found the article useful. There is debate in the SEO community over whether there is any benefit of one TLD over another. Some have suggested a .org, .edu or .gov holds an advantage, as these domains tend to rank highly. However, I think this is missing the point: these TLDs rank highly because they are usually associated with authoritative websites.

From hearing Googlers talk, I doubt there is any policy to penalise or promote a website based on its TLD. They will look at the content rather than the domain address. However, what does matter is people’s reaction to a domain name, and in this case people are biased towards .edu, .gov, .org, .com - not necessarily in that order - and their local ccTLD.

So in your case, if you are going to be focussing on a country for your social network, then you may want to choose a ccTLD. Otherwise, you are probably best served by a .com.

Let me know if you have any more questions. Ben