Orkut, Google’s growing social network that gets no love back in the United States, has announced a number of design changes. Before/after shots can be found here.
Orkut continues to show growth in unique visitors, even if its far behind MySpace and Facebook, according to Comscore data released last month (see table after the jump below).
However, Orkut had 38 billion pageviews in July versus Facebook’s 31 billion, notes Techcrunch, again citing Comscore worldwide data.
Could it be that Orkut users, by all accounts mostly in Brazil and India, are some of the most addicted of any large social network users — surfing more pages more frequently than their counterparts at other networks?
More interesting is what Google might do with Orkut in the future. Talented new hire Brad Fitzpatrick, for example, wants to create (see our coverage; scroll down) a way for users and developers to more openly share data across social networks and other sites.
2 Comments
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Felipe Albertao said:
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.
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Abhishek said:
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-refreshed-but-where-is-socialstream/
Abhishek
