October 22nd, 2008
Social Network World Map: Why Do Indians & Brazilians Love Orkut?
Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)
Here’s the latest world map of social networks based on Alexa data (via Oxyweb) –
– and Indian and Brazil are the only two countries in the world where Orkut is the most popular social network.
I have often wondered what joins Brazilians and Indians in their love for Orkut. The answer is a combination of serendipity, first mover advantage, faster loading time, simplicity of the name, similarity of the name to Hindi/ Portuguese sounds, simplicity of the user interface, and association with the Google brand name, but the most powerful reason is the lax attitude towards privacy common to Indians and Brazilians.
In spite of the contrary results on the Synovate survey on online privacy, both Brazilians and Indians share generally lax attitudes about online privacy.
This is reflected in the much less fine-grained privacy controls (only friends and friend-of-friends), the excessively open, almost exhibitionist profiles (especially by Brazilian women), the very voyeuristic and totally transparent browsing behavior of Brazilian and Indian men (and their tendency to ask strange women to be friends), the general tendency to add strangers as friends, the open “crush” and “favorite” features, and, finally, the open and often spammy scrapbooks.
Here’s my theory of Orkut adoption in Brazil and India –
Step 1: Orkut became popular in Brazil and India because of the first mover advantage. Google spread to the international markets earlier than either Facebook or MySpace did. It helped that all the reasons described above worked in Orkut’s favor.
Step 2: As a result of the invitation based membership system, Orkut’s membership stayed limited to Brazil, India, Iran (where it was subsequently banned) and United States. As Brazilians started dominating Orkut, it turned off the Americans (a similar dynamic also happened in the case of Fotolog). However, the strong presence of the Brazilians was not a turn off for the Indians and may have even been an additional turn on (many Indian male Orkut users spend hours browsing through the profiles of female Brazilian users). So, Brazilians and Indians continued to grow on Orkut.
Step 3: As Orkut became the default social network in Brazil and India, the network effects kicked in. As most Brazilian and Indian social networking users were on Orkut, new users made their first, and often the only, social networking profile on Orkut, in order to connect with their friends.
Step 4: Now that Orkut is managed out of Brazil, most Brazilians look at it with pride as a local social network. So, the dominance of Orkut in the Brazilian social networking space is not likely to be threatened. However, ever since Facebook opened up, it has made steady inroads into Orkut’s territory in India, through a trickle down process. First the NRIs (Non Resident Indians) started using it in their US universities, then they got their well-to-do friends in metro India to move from Orkut to Facebook and now youngsters in even smaller towns are beginning to use Facebook, along with Orkut.
For more on why Orkut is popular in Brazil see posts by Daniel Duende and Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, and the discussion in the comments section on this otherwise pointless post by Loren Baker.
A ‘community’ could be described as any group of people who share beliefs or a feeling of belonging together or a common interest or purpose.
People Join communities by
1) Being referred to that community by their friends (orkut used to be invite only).
2) Common interests and the ease of creating a community.
Orkut makes it really easy to create or delete a community.This has still not been replicated under facebook the group number on orkut far exceed the facebook group (the layout makes a huge difference)
The ease to find a friend and add a friend . A lot of these features are not incorporated into all other social networks.
3) Privacy - The content of orkut is not crawled by search engines.Users feel a sense of privacy and hence love to share.
Most users do not post copyrighted material . Studying the posts most are chatter ,games (comment on the user above you for example), and other information.
[Reply]
Gaurav,
Question on your point 1.Why Brazil? Because of the social-network-able age group forming considerable portion of the population?
Why did it not work out in other countries that may have similar demographics like a Brazil and India?
Anyways, good read.
Have not been following this place for quite sometime. Guess,I have been missing a lot.
-Nikhil
[Reply]
[...] would have wondered why we see so many Indians and Brazilians on orkut.But why? Gaurav tries to answer this. As Brazilians started dominating Orkut, it turned off the Americans (a similar dynamic also [...]
For a similar reason, “texting” is soon making inroads into Indian vocabulary, slowly replacing “SMSing”.
[Reply]
Orkut did not really have any privacy feature with it when it started. So I think the Indians did not have a choice. But as far as I've observed users on facebook, the Americans have their profile open to everyone while the Indians have limited profile visibility to strangers. So I guess the privacy argument doesn't really hold.
[Reply]
[...] The conclusion that Indians are more concerned about online privacy than Brazilians and Americans further complicates my research on attitudes towards online privacy in BRIC countries. Another research by Synovate showed that Brazilians and Americans are more concerned about online privacy than Indians, whereas my own understanding is that both Brazilians and Indians are much less concerned about online privacy than Americans. [...]
@Delltechie: Yes, the ease of joining a community and adding a friend are definitely big factors for Orkut's popularity. I'm not sure, however, if Orkut users really think about whether or not Orkut is being indexed by search engines.
@Nikhil: Welcome back! There are many factors why a social network should be more popular in Brazil than, let's say, in the United States: a more social cultural context and a higher percentage of young early adopter users. I have tried to explain in the post why Orkut might have become popular in Brazil. However, in the end, I think it's mostly serendipity that Orkut became more popular in Brazil than other social networks.
@Sri: Yes, I'm also beginning to think of SMSing as text messaging.
@Adithya: I have some new research on privacy that should clear the muddied waters. New post coming up soon.
[Reply]
HI Gaurav,
Great Post. One belief I have been holding close to my chest was what you mentioned. The NRI-Indian metro and so on route. Also Somewhere between point 1 and point 3 (which you missed )is the early adoption of orkut by mavens. These mavens are described in good detail by Malcolm gladwell in “Tipping Point” and The art of Persuasion by another author. And this phenomenon was also confirmed in a conference by a orkut's product manager in India. Have you come across a way to attract such mavens?
[Reply]