I added Orkut.com to the 'ones to watch' (See left hand navigation) a couple of days back - but thought it worth drawing attention to here.
My apologies if you are one of the 32M plus people already connected through Orkut.com. Yes, that's right 32M. I hadn't even heard of it until early this week.
I only checked it out because I was having a look at the dominance social networking sites are having in Alexa.com's top 10 global sites. Orkut was a new one on me in at No10!
3 out of 10 are English language social-networking sites.
Orkut is owned by google. How long that has been the case (the site has been around since early 2004) I'm afraid I don't know. What makes this one to watch is how and when they intend to monetise it. I can't spot a single ad on it! Not even a google one.
Remember the google motto: "You can't milk a calf..."
Why hadn't I heard of one of the top 10 biggest sites in the world? Almost certainly because it's Brazillian based - and here's where there is potential for this to grow further. About 65% of users are Brazillian, 15% American, 11% Indian. More Iranians use the site than UK citizens (0.7% of users were from the UK on Nov 15, 2006). If the European figures grow now that Europeans (like me) are starting to discover it, how big could this get?
The further ahead you look - the faster you go | davidpcushman AT gmail.com | These are my views and my views only.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
FasterFuture.blogspot.com
The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
Orkut has been a Google product since launch - it was a 20% time project.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that they've avoided adding AdSense ads so far because until this year it was mostly associated with Brazilian paedophiles and al-Qaeda, so they don't want to plaster the Google brand over it too heavily. However, if you're on Orkut then Google can use your Orkut profile to target any Google ads you see anywhere else on the web.
They've recently removed the requirement that all users be invited by an existing user. That's understandable since that's what allegedly made it so popular with paedophiles, but it may also risk turning it into just another myspace.
Thanks for posting. That's really interesting (and enlightening). So it's a google device to know who you are so when you are on any other site (presumably while google logged in) they can serve ever more targeted ads for you.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know how they are measuring the success (or otherwise) of this - and whether or not that's the only way they intend to monetise?
I'll check out googlelabs to see if there's any clues to be had!