[soneca]

None. It is a completely strange word for us, our words normally doesn't end with a consonant (never with a 't') and we don't even use 'k' in our alphabet. I guess not even Google knows why it went so viral here. A proof of that is that now Facebook is by far the most used social network here (Google didn't even try to make Orkut -> GooglePlus transition, I don't know why).

[rachelbythebay]

Thanks for the language tip! I always wondered if there was some kind of local connection which made it work and was completely opaque to everyone back in Mountain View. It seems nobody knows, or if they know, they aren't telling.

Orkut was great stuff. Every time they went down, I'd get paged (if on call that week) because every single person in Brazil would go back to the login page and start submitting the form over, and over, and over...

I wasn't on-call for Orkut, but rather something else it depended on. All of that login load translated through to us. It got to the point where we'd interpret a load spike as "let's check Orkut" and when it got to "yep, it's down", we'd just ignore it.

[Evbn]

Orkut was something like 5 years old before G+ was built. It has such a different social/sharing/privacy model, so it would be hard to convert, and it is only a major player in one country.

[soneca]

Ok, so "hard to convert" is a good enough reason to just ignore 40 million very active users.

[Samuel_Michon]

See also: Google Reader.

[soneca]

People spent lots of time at Orkut pages, not just using a protocol through other apps. There is advertising in there. And social networking is a business goal for them.