Frankly, google doesn't have much of a chance. They are desperate in this space. This is evidenced by them blindly pumping ~billion into myspace. Orkut is a flop, except in brazil. Meanwhile facebook continues to lay waste to the industry.
People keep passing around that little story about Orkut is only popular in Brazil but never go beyond that. Orkut has a 68 million users, it's not Myspace or Facebook numbers, but a flop? Jesus Tapdancing Christ, when was your last project scaling at 68 million?
And who's to say that Orkut is even Google's response to Facebook. It was an acquisition, if anything I see it as a technology buy. They wanted to know how a social network would operate and function and they bought something that works in the International market to test it.
But I still think my point still stands, social networking is just a paradigm. It is not separate service or platform, it is just how features are organized. And almost every feature Facebook has, GYM has. The only innovation Facebook ever done was come out with poke. But then again, I've been pinging or yt?-ing my friends since AOL 2.1.
"In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Buyukkokten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code.[ambiguous] Originally the Orkut community was felt to be elitist, because its membership was by invitation only. At the end of July 2004 Orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark and by the following September it had surpassed 2,000,000. As of August 2007, the number of members equated to over 67,000,000 users."
Yeah, I still say it is a flop. Any company with google's resources, should have been able to leverage them much better than they have. Also, if they really thought they would be able to build something compelling, why would they pay murdoch and co all the money they did instead of just building their own/
1. Leveraging means putting it in your face. Anything on Google.com right now will gain quite a lot of leveraging (except for Gpay, I don't know what kind of conversion was attained when that link was on the front page). Google has made it a mission to avoid that because people everywhere will instantly complain and bitch when little notes start popping up asking you to join Orkut.
2. As for paying all that money to News Corp? Maybe the same reason Microsoft is paying all that money to Facebook? They're paying a giant game of expensive keepaway.
Well, as for point number 1, thats what I mean...they are desperate. If they can't leverage current resources and a 200B valuation, how the hell are they going to beat facebook. Oh, and by the way, once FB/MSFT decides to make a push in Brazil, orkut can kiss their mkt share goodbye. Facebook is just that much better.
