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Orkut was huge in Brazil in the early-mid-noughties. I always wondered what the factors were that caused this kind of social network to take off early there, at

Orkut was huge in Brazil in the early-mid-noughties. I always wondered what the factors were that caused this kind of social network to take off early there, at a time when phones were dumb and hardly anyone had a PC, and well before even myspace was big in N. America.

lupire 4y ago
Brazil is a huge country that speaks Portuguese. That gives a chance for a separate network to scale up without being overtaken by a larger English or Chinese language network.
- nwatson 4y ago
  My father went to Brazil in the early 2000s several times over a few years and was astounded at how many PCs he saw in homes. Places with no utilities, refrigerators in the 1970s had PCs 25 years later.
cesarb 4y ago
> at a time when phones were dumb and hardly anyone had a PC It was a time when "LAN house" were common here in Brazil. Think of them as the Internet equivalent of public payphones: a "LAN house" is a place with several computers, networked together in a LAN (thus the name; LAN-networked games like Doom or Quake were huge back then), with Internet access, often with several software pre-installed (including games), and paid by the hour. There were also other factors. It was not long after Plano Real, which not only fixed the hyperinflation we had before, but also (as part of its mechanics) temporarily fixed the exchange rate at 1 USD, so importing PCs became cheaper; and also not long after the import restrictions ("reserva de mercado") for computers had ended. Each family having its own PC back then was not as uncommon as you might think.
- elevaet 4y ago
  Ah that makes sense thanks, especially the 1 real = 1 USD period. When I visited Brazil around that time, people were accessing Orkut in these LAN houses. Having a PC at home seemed rare where I was in Bahia, probably because the economy tends to be a bit poorer there, so even with those favourable conditions a PC would have been out of reach for many ppl.

lupire 4y ago

Brazil is a huge country that speaks Portuguese. That gives a chance for a separate network to scale up without being overtaken by a larger English or Chinese language network.

nwatson 4y ago
My father went to Brazil in the early 2000s several times over a few years and was astounded at how many PCs he saw in homes. Places with no utilities, refrigerators in the 1970s had PCs 25 years later.

cesarb 4y ago

> at a time when phones were dumb and hardly anyone had a PC It was a time when "LAN house" were common here in Brazil. Think of them as the Internet equivalent of public payphones: a "LAN house" is a place with several computers, networked together in a LAN (thus the name; LAN-networked games like Doom or Quake were huge back then), with Internet access, often with several software pre-installed (including games), and paid by the hour. There were also other factors. It was not long after Plano Real, which not only fixed the hyperinflation we had before, but also (as part of its mechanics) temporarily fixed the exchange rate at 1 USD, so importing PCs became cheaper; and also not long after the import restrictions ("reserva de mercado") for computers had ended. Each family having its own PC back then was not as uncommon as you might think.

elevaet 4y ago
Ah that makes sense thanks, especially the 1 real = 1 USD period. When I visited Brazil around that time, people were accessing Orkut in these LAN houses. Having a PC at home seemed rare where I was in Bahia, probably because the economy tends to be a bit poorer there, so even with those favourable conditions a PC would have been out of reach for many ppl.