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Google: Orkut Will Co-Exist With Google+
splitenz writes "Google's other social networking site, Orkut, which has been around for about seven years and has tens of millions of users worldwide, will continue to operate alongside the new Google+ for now. However, Google is leaving its options open regarding the possibility of fusing the two through some sort of integration further down the road."
Orkut's stil a thing, huh?
Google actually has a huge opportunity with Orkut already being a fully developed and separate network. Data liberation is great, but the real value in social networking is the connections, not just the content. Orkut could give them a testbed for a federation API that will let people network and share no matter what site they call home - and would send the message that Google wants to be the best at sharing by continuing to provide a superior experience, rather than by enticing users in and then keeping their network locked up as the service turns into another MySpace.
The Orkut is used primarily in India and South America while the new tool is targeted to Europe and North America. But I cannot see Google maintaining two separate yet identical services for very long.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
If that's the case then Google+ is going to be a major failure because everyone is going to get shitspam from Brazilians...
Slashdot seems to be doing quite well still, despite all the shitspam from racist bigots.
Bah, I'm Brazilian and I also can't stand Orkut due to the amount of Brazilian-generated shitspam. It's not really racism but more just a statement of fact.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Brazilians are not a race. They are a nation and to a lesser extent, a culture. Not all cultures are equally worthy of respect. Brazilians as a whole are a scourge on the internet. They swarm like locusts to their chosen target, take it over and drive out every other culture. Pretty much the antithesis of what the internet is. I've never seen a large group of Brazilians coexist peacefully with any other group. If you want to accuse anyone of racism, start with those xenophobes.
I'm Brazilian. Orkut is still very popular here, but lost some space to facebook. A reason is that orkut is FULL of low-brow content. "Orkutization" is used as a verb to define the rise of low-brow content in a given service.
There's no way in hell Google is going to migrate all this.
Every time I hear about Orkut I log-in and check if my account still exists, if there is ANYTHING in there. Usually I see the friends' profiles with outdated images and 3 year old posts.
It makes me wonder whether the other tens of millions of users are also just stale accounts or if anyone is still using the service actively.
So I take you've never met:
Russians
Indians
Chinese
Japanese
Italians (ugggh)
Danish (uggggggh)
I urge you to try out any World of Warcraft European server that's not majorly english, like Xavius-EU (majorly italian) or any similar one - there are many out there. You'll see that essentially every nationality likes to drive others "out" and make their server/community into their own nice walled garden, while actively hounding any outsider who tries to disturb them.
That's just basic human tribalism. Everyone is guilty of it on base level, even if certain cultures elevate it to be more acceptable then others.
WoW is exactly what I was thinking of. At least the Europeans you're talking about are using the servers designated for them. Brazilians refuse to use the Latin American servers because they would have to associate with Spansh speakers. Apparently invading the North American servers is a better idea. I guess the rest of Latin America stopped putting up with their crap or something.
The Quebec French have some pretty large enclaves on North American servers too. The majority on a few servers. The difference is that they belong there and they seem to recognize that they have to coexist with Engish speakers.
Make all 3 separate faces to the same thing.
Google Buzz : essentially just the wall aspect of communication.
Google+ : this is the Buzz plus more detailed social interaction.
Google Orkut (possibly a new name, Google Social?) : Google+ and the more advanced social networking featuresets, such as picture uploads, applications, etc.
They badly need to do this.
They actually have a seriously good chance of going up against Facebook with this. People are slowly beginning to hate Facebook.
They only use it because it is there and their friends are there.
Every half year, Facebook break a little more of their site and remove some really good features for god knows what reason. It is turning in to white clothing and no running the longer it lives. At some point accounts are going to start getting deleted for the sake of the servers!
But I know they will screw this up. Google SUCK with co-ordination, it is their biggest weak point.
There is too little help and resources behind some projects, some projects that actually DO need a lot of resources to be pulled off well enough. Look at Wave, Wave would have been brilliant, but it wasn't a focus point, it stagnated, too many people got on it, and it wasn't optimized and turned off so many people during the testing. They also tried to do too much at once. JavaScript, as good as it is now, is still terrible when it comes to working with thousands of DOM elements. There needs to be a simpler DOM system for basic objects that don't require 50 million different attributes. There is no reason not to have it. Something like XUL.
Sorry for the little ranting.
I hope I am wrong, I really do, but considering Orkut, Buzz, Wave.. they don't exactly have a good track record when it comes to large-scale services.
Gmail has been one of the few large-scale things that lasted, simply because they offered way more than anything else did.
And possibly because of the right timing, aka, luck.
If they fail at this, they seriously need to took a long hard look at the mirror and figure out what the hell they actually want.
The whole "personal project" thing they have going doesn't seem to be working well at all.
Google could try to tinker with the interoperability of the two sites.
So people don't have to choose between orkut and google plus.
I'd like to design a solution that merges the back ends allowing the use of either front end. If possible of course, I would need to examine closer.
That sounds like a fun project actually...
I hope they try it, if not I will be disappointed.
A reason is that orkut is FULL of low-brow content. "Orkutization" is used as a verb to define the rise of low-brow content in a given service.
Can you explain what you mean by "low-brow"?
Are we talking porn? Just uninteresting garbage? Spam?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I would be surprised if they not. Google+ is something that feels incomplete yet, and some of the missing bits and ways of interaction could perfectly be provided by their other services, including orkut. And if they design this well (in the "dont do evil" sense) will be able to be as much integrated with services from other parties. Won't be surprised if more bits from Wave lands there, too.
I wonder how far they could go in that interaction. And how far they will end going thanks to regulations, security/privacy concerns, abuses of the system and goverrnments influence.
But it is the weakest in the majority who hound the outsiders. It is not "tribalism" as much as "alpha-dog-ism". It is easier to gain acceptance at the top of the tribe than at the bottom.
Gently reply
Google+ is going to be a lot less cool if Brazil and India get invites before me.
What I find odd is that they haven't integrated Buzz.
Actually, what I find odd is that G+ is even *in* beta. It's basically Buzz with extra (and not entirely intuitive) privacy features, a slapdash news search system, and a chatroom loosely hung together.
A Facebook killer it isn't.
I urge you to try out any World of Warcraft European server that's not majorly english, like Xavius-EU (majorly italian) or any similar one - there are many out there. You'll see that essentially every nationality likes to drive others "out" and make their server/community into their own nice walled garden, while actively hounding any outsider who tries to disturb them. That's just basic human tribalism. Everyone is guilty of it on base level, even if certain cultures elevate it to be more acceptable then others.
... Try out any WoW server that *is* english and try speaking anything BUT english. Sure, some people don't mind. But it doesn't take long for some stupid american to start telling you to "go back home", or "learn a real language".
... on a micro level and on a macro level. Just look at all the BS wars the US is heading up.
Tribalism? I'm pretty sure the americans didn't invent it. But they've certainly perfected it
I hope I am wrong, I really do, but considering Orkut, Buzz, Wave.. they don't exactly have a good track record when it comes to large-scale services.
Yeah, look at the terrible job they did organizing teh interwebz. At least gmail isn't a large-scale operation, because I'd be sorely disappointed to find out that it sucks after all these years.
I've been meaning to delete my account for a while now.
I hope they keep it open indefinitely to keep the trash Brazilians and their kind away from the rest of the Internet.
LOL Its still in beta after 7 years LOL. And please link to the data that says they have tens of millions of user please
Jack of all trades,master of none