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by kingsley_20 5075 days ago
I resent the digs at Orkut. It was a great community - if you were Brazilian or Indian. That Google chose not to run with it says more about their lack of long term social vision and parochialism than about the health of the community itself.
2 comments
dalton 5075 days ago
To be clear, it's not a "dig" at international users.

To speak from personal experience, the site that I was founder/CEO of earlier in my career, imeem, was wildly popular in the Philippines and Thailand. At peak, we were a top 20 site in the Philippines, according to Alexa.

We spent a lot of time adding country-specific filters to music charts, comments, etc once tagalog and thai started seeping into every page of the site.

We loved our foreign users, but from an advertising business perspective, a user in southeast asia is worth a small fraction of a US or UK user. The relative low value of developing country users to brand advertisers is the primary reason sites like Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, etc ended up in the place they are.

It's not a question of nationalism, it really does boil down the what the advertising market is willing to pay. This is one additional factor re:why ad-supported social platforms end up with mis-aligned incentives w/users...

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kingsley_20 5075 days ago
I would invest the same way (focus on users in developed economies) if it were my startup - but Google isn't a startup. When you have two of the BRIC economies sewn up in a social network, AND you have cash to stay for the long game, I think you're doing your shareholders a disservice by not sticking it out.
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dredmorbius 5075 days ago
The digs weren't so much against Orkut as about the emergence of two distinct, but conflicting, language/national cultures on Orkut, with few tools to separate them for users who weren't interested.

Curiously, I'm seeing this play out on G+ as well, which has a pretty broad international following, including a large multi-lingual contingent. There are people whose occasional English-language posts interest me, but whose non-English content is rather less compelling (you might feel similarly if I regaled you in Krell). It's part of a larger problem of poor noise controls on G+.

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