Too little, too late: Google launches Orkut for iPhone
Orkut, a Google-owned social network, has had little luck challenging MySpace, hi5, Tagged or Facebook —the undisputed social networking leader (some people even liken Orkut to a poor man's Facebook).
Context & Ripple Effects
Orkut has been running on borrowed time inside Google for years. The 2007 profile of Orkut's global ambitions was followed within days by Google pulling ads from the service, and by August 2010 the [[a:1188171|successive Orkut tweaks were being read as groundwork for a broader 'Google Me' social push]] rather than a bet on Orkut itself.
That push arrived as Google+, which Wired examined in September 2011 as Google's real social vehicle. An iPhone client landing in January 2012 therefore reads less like expansion and more like housekeeping: Google is finally giving its first social network a mobile presence at exactly the moment its flagship effort — and the rumored Facebook IPO reportedly tracking toward May — define the competitive field.
First-order effects
- iPhone users gain a native Orkut client, closing an access gap for a network that had been desktop-bound while rivals' apps were standard smartphone fixtures.
- The launch does nothing to change Orkut's standing against Facebook, MySpace, hi5 and Tagged, which the coverage describes as having already won the contest — hence the 'too little, too late' framing.
Second-order effects
- Google's own mobile-social investment now flows to Google+, leaving Orkut as a maintained legacy property competing for the same users and engineering attention inside the company.
- With Facebook's IPO reportedly imminent, Google's social portfolio gets judged as a whole: a neglected Orkut alongside a funded Google+ signals where management expects the returns to come from.
Third-order effects
- The episode fits a consolidation pattern in social networking: once a market settles on a leader, second-tier networks stop being growth bets and become cost lines, with their owners eventually choosing between freezing and retiring them.
- For platform strategy generally, it shows that late mobile ports cannot revive a network whose decline predates the smartphone era — distribution follows gravity, not the other way round.
The trend: Social networking is consolidating around per-company flagships, with legacy properties like Orkut reduced to maintenance mode as owners concentrate on a single challenger brand.