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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."
More or less the thing for social networking in places like Brazil and India.
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.
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.
Not in India anymore. I do not know anyone who still uses orkut. Everyone has moved to Facebook.
Almost the same applies to Brazil. Most of the older users have moved to Facebook. Orkut is now a niche for pre-teens. Some of them curiously do not even use e-mail anymore, and communicate using 'orkut testimonials' (yeah, very stupid, I know). Orkut even implemented a longer type of direct message but the old usage lingers. It was funny from time to time seeing very private messages that were sent as testimonials being 'accepted' and shown to everyone on their profiles (bank account PINs, telephone numbers, private details of intimate encounters...) . The rule was to add a text to the beginning "do not accept the testimonial" apparently it not always worked.
He's just being elitist.
Call him (or me for that matter - I'm brazilian too) however you want, but you can't deny the content these "poor people" produce have near-zero cultural or informative value. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. While the term "low-brow" may sound harsh or elitist, it just reflects the reality of the situation. I'm not saying those people should be denied access to the network though - to the contrary. To be honest, I think most of the whining about "stupid content on social networks" (from whatever source - I've seen americans complaining about stupid content from other americans on facebook, as I'm sure you've too) is overrated: Facebook, Orkut, whatever, they all provide tools for you to block or filter the content you're not interested in. You can't complain if you're just being lazy.
Google+ is going to be a lot less cool if Brazil and India get invites before me.