Is Orkut Dying?

[Kerry]

Originally Posted by zima

Kerry, that's precizelly their way of doing things: not be arrogand - let users decide which of their products are great and which sucks. But that requires pushing them out the door.

I see your point. But I think if they are gonna take that approach, they should call it "test beta" or something like that, but that would probably cause more problems. And I think everyone is in agreement that Orkut stinks & is too far gone, so now what?

[mondine]

Oh, I don't know that it's "too far gone".
Who knows, with the steady influx of new users, it may eventually improve on its own.

I think that with Google behind it, the server problems will eventually be worked out.
What I'd like to see is just more of a distinctive form of groupings- more insulated areas for separate areas of lanuage use. Orkut-English, Orkut-Spanish, Orkut-Portuguese, etc.

[Kerry]

BTW, here is a quote from the wikipedia about Orkut entitled "The Brazilian Invasion":

The orkut community has been watching a large surge of Brazilian users registering on its service. This is a known and curious fact, and it is being the target of disappointment of many users from other countries, including the United States. The number of Brazilian orkut users has reached approximately 73.25% of the total of users, followed by United States, with about 9.93%. Due to the number of Brazilian users and communities in the Portuguese language, users from other parts of the world became upset with the service, when it established Portuguese as the first "alternate default language," (as English was the primary default language) prompting many community owners to enforce an english only posting policy. Some went as far as to start online communities and discussion groups dedicated to complain about this phenomenon. Hoaxes have also been spread, with the intention of tricking Brazilian users to change their nationality in orkut. Actually, many Brazilian users change their nationality in orkut, confusing other members when using the Friends Search tool. As a reaction to this surge of Brazilian users, orkut recently introduced Portuguese as a second language to its interface, due to countless requests. The "brazilian takeover" has been documented elsewhere: [1] [2] [3] [4].

The reasons for this phenomenon apparently follows the Brazilian Internet Phenomenon. Services such as weblogs and photoblogs are now very popular with Brazilian users as well. For example, it's not hard to see Internet searches within the Brazilian territory returning several results pointing to weblog entries. That is seldom seen in other parts of the world. The popularity of such services in Brazil intrigues many people, making this phenomenon worthy of study.

According to statistics orkut has turned most popular in little Eastern-European country Estonia where a little more than 3% (June 2005) of the population are registered orkut users. Brazil holds the second place (about 2.5% of the population in the south east of the country). All the other countries in top 10 list have users less than 0.5%.

Some complaints that have been made against Brazilians include the cloning of profiles; a person might have thousands of them, even though the disclaimer states that only one is allowed; the creation of joke and defamatory profiles and communities, confusing foreigners in Community Browsing; the selection of other countries in the profile, confusing actual residents of those countries in Friends Search; the "invasion" of English-language communities; and the vandalizing and flooding of the scrap books. This behavior is not limited to Brazilians, however, to some it seems incredible due to the high concentration of Brazilians. It is possible that the percentages of misuse are no higher on orkut than on any similar English-language site.

In a recent interview to a Brazilian news site [5] the creator of orkut said he doesn't understand the phenomenon and complains about the fact that North-American press and users are ignoring the service and using similar services like Friendster and thefacebook. He also noted that Brazil is actually the main focus of orkut.

Im not sure when this article came out, so does anyone have actual stats on Orkut & the percent of users from each countries?

[mondine]

All I know is that it's a pretty old article. People have been quoting it for a long time.

(Also, I reformatted your post. Please use the "Quote" BBCode in the future.)

[ryan999]

i=there was a lot of hype over orkut a ear ago but i never use it anymore i dont see the point

[zima]

Originally Posted by Kerry

I see your point. But I think if they are gonna take that approach, they should call it "test beta" or something like that, but that would probably cause more problems. And I think everyone is in agreement that Orkut stinks & is too far gone, so now what?

Beta is a beta, end of discussion (no point in calling it "beta beta", "alpha beta" or "beta beta beta")

[aalishan]

Orkut is not dying i think its spreading more

Everyone uses Orkut

[bali]

Prkut is spreading a great deal in PAkistan..

people like orkut like very much

[kraeftig]

I realize that we're all just a bunch of conceited (insert profanity here), but I live here and it's something that I would like to use. What is the promotion/plan for America? Is there renewed usage from the more adult side of the internet (reference to the teeny/twenty myspacers)?

I still wonder about the original question...

IS ORKUT DYING?

We still haven't gotten a clear answer about this. I know that Brazil Orkut is blowin' up like chingy, but what about the service as a whole? Is there anyone out there that can give us the skinny?