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The "trouble" with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States. Brazil and later India made up the majority. Those eyeballs wer
by philsnow 8y ago
The "trouble" with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States. Brazil and later India made up the majority.
Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.
- z92 8y agoThat was because you couldn't "sign up" for Orkut. You had to receive an invitation from someone who already has an account. Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly. The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap. Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time. That's what I felt was happening as an outsider.
- zapzupnz 8y ago> Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own Myspace, Friendster, Bebo…
- icebraining 8y agoAnd Hi5 - I remember kids using that before FB took over.
- romwell 8y ago>Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own. That's doubly false :) First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups. Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.
- rincebrain 8y agoMinor remark - LiveJournal had a closed invite (or pay to play) system for a few years, before doing open access again. :)
- z92 8y agoIndeed. But you get the point.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lugg 8y ago> Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly. I laughed far harder than I should have.
- jmmcd 8y agoThey are beautiful regions. Have you had the chance to visit?
- IshKebab 8y agoNo way does a social network require more compute than searching the entire internet. That is ridiculous. They cut Orkut because Brazilians aren't worth much in advertising. Plain and simple.
- rusk 8y ago> Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to intelligence agencies
- lallysingh 8y agoWhere on the 10-Q is revenue from intelligence agencies? I seemed to have missed that line.
- acct1771 8y agohttps://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
- lallysingh 8y agoThe argument structure there 'a related to b related to c, therefore c works for a', isn't far from what they use on Ancient Aliens. So, where's the actual profit? Or is this all mind control, friend-of-a-friend illuminati stuff that's assumed to make Google want to do this stuff?
- acct1771 8y agoYou have a short attention span for a finance guy... Argue the points, or don't bother addressing the writeup. Good grief.
- lallysingh 8y agoGoing ad-hominem now? What points? You posted URLs. Neither of the URLs showed a revenue stream to Google.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]