DISQUS

Felipe Albertao · 2 years ago

As a Brazilian living in Silicon Valley, it is very hard for me to understand why the venture community ignored Orkut's phenomenon for such a long time. In Brazil (and probably in India too) Orkut is more than a social network: It is a Craigslist, Facebook, MySpace, and Classmates.com ALL COMBINED in one single social network. And I'm talking about demographics and behavior, not software features.

Furthermore, Orkut as a brand is hugely popular: Just go right now (3pm PST) to g1.com.br, the largest news site in Brazil and you will see the "Orkut" word in the front page news. Even those without Internet access know Orkut -- there is even a country song called "I Will Delete You From My Orkut" (!!)

And I am not even mentioning the ecosystem that was created around Orkut by third-party developers -- without a official API!!

In conclusion, traffic is actually not the most surprising thing about Orkut. More importantly is the fact (ignored so far) that Orkut presents a *huge* untapped opportunity for capitalization beyond simply page views.

Abhishek · 2 years ago

Well I was very disappointed to see that SocialStream features werent incorporated. Who knows what Google is doing with that project.

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

http://abhishek.tiwari.com/2007/08/25/orkut-ref...

Abhishek