(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.
