Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition
Seizing on Orkut's momentum in Asia and Latin America, Google moves to revamp its social networking site and take aim at Facebook and MySpace — If it's not about MySpace and Facebook, then the breathless buzz that surrounds online social networking often gravitates …
Context & Ripple Effects
The revamp caps a year of mounting scrutiny of Google's social property: a July piece on improving Google's social network flagged how far Orkut trailed its rivals, and this move is Google's answer — leaning on the strength Orkut actually has, its user base across Asia and Latin America, rather than fighting MySpace and Facebook where they are strongest.
The timing matters within Google's own arc: the same day's coverage has the company crossing $600 per share (roughly $188 billion in market cap) and pushing YouTube videos out onto thousands of third-party sites with attached ads. Orkut's overhaul sits alongside those moves as part of a broader effort to convert Google's reach into defensible positions beyond search.
First-order effects
- Orkut's core users in Brazil and India get a redesigned product built to hold them, while Google effectively concedes the US market by competing on geography instead of head-on with MySpace and Facebook.
- Facebook — framed in the same coverage as potentially the biggest and most valuable database in the world — becomes the explicit benchmark Google is measuring Orkut against.
Second-order effects
- MySpace and Facebook face pressure to expand harder into Asia and Latin America, converting Orkut's regional strongholds from safe havens into contested markets.
- Advertisers get a new pitch: Google can test whether its ad machine, already being extended through the YouTube syndication push, can monetize a social graph that lags its rivals'.
Third-order effects
- If regional loyalty holds, the market splits structurally between US-centric leaders and emerging-market incumbents, raising the cost of any single global winner in social networking.
- Google's cycle of retooling its own social property rather than growing an organic graph points to continued structural experimentation — the company's search-and-ads strengths demonstrably do not transfer automatically to social, and each revamp is another attempt to solve that gap.
The trend: Mid-2000s social networking is dividing into a US-led contest between MySpace and Facebook and defended regional strongholds, forcing even the best-resourced platforms to keep rebuilding their social bets.