I assume they are calling it a Brazilian social network because Orkut has done particularly well in Brazil. 50% of the site's visits come from Brazil, with the remainder mostly split between the US and India. Orkut is administrated by Google Brazil since mid-2008.
Before that there was a Brazilian invasion of Fotolog.
Livejournal had a Russian invasion, Flickr had an early invasion of kids from the U.A.E. and was blocked there for a while, Xanga went asian, Bebo went British.
You can't really predict how localized network effects will transform a globally-accessible online community.
I have a hard-to-test-theory involving the nodes with high betweenness-centrality that may explain regional popularity. The "most-connected" (eigenvector or page-rank) nodes may be much less valuable than the "more-diversely-connected" nodes (betweenness centrality being a good measure of this)) in their ability to persuade conversion.
At this point I think we can safely say Google is in a perpetual state of "about to launch a Facebook killer" and will continue to be so until they actually manage to kill Facebook. So without any details to back it up Kevin Rose's source is just stating the obvious as far as I'm concerned.
I feel like Google is constantly launching Facebook killers and waiting to see what will stick. They have so many different social networks and feed mechanisms that it's hard to discern a coherent strategy from them.
... and it looks like facebook will soon launch what sounds like a social powered question answer site, according to their "beta" recruitment page - http://www.facebook.com/product_application/
I don't think it's possible to launch a Facebook killer. It is more likely that some company will launch something that eventually kills Facebook, but we won't know it is a Facebook killer until afterwards. It's not a matter of beating them on specs...
Agreed, can't kill Facebook by copying it. It'd be easier to kill Google by copying it (less network effects there), and that's pretty much impossible too.
I rather like Google Buzz actually and probably now use it 1/5-1/4 as much as Twitter. It's very simple to use with the great GMail inbox integration and connects me to a different set of friends vs. Twitter and Facebook.
I believe fizx was referring to Jaiku (twitter competitor) and Knoll (Wikipedia competitor), not Buzz. both of which failed to rick off.
I think with buzz they are trying to make a service which brings all the features of the various social networks to one platform, its something between Facebook (you can "like" stuff), tumblr (judging by the length of the posts and it allows comments), and twitter.
I have to say that buzz is really nice, and I would use it if it didn't have the gmail requirement.
I think in the last decade "killer" has become something of a cursed moniker. The last person to do a string of "killers" was 90's Bill Gates at Microsoft. When he decided he wanted to take a market, he just took it.
Since then products have almost inevitably become killers sort of by accident, especially in the fast-moving and uncertain age of the web. Making a killer thus is kind of like skating to where the puck has been, not where it is going.
The only way to beat facebook is to out-open them. Facebook thrives on being a place where users have very tight control over their identities. Watch for something that strips that control from everyone.
For a while now Google has been pushing a much need redesign for Orkut (I don't have it yet, nor have I ever really used the service). I somehow doubt they're giving up it just yet.
Does Google really see Facebook as a threat? Maybe they could also fund Diaspora like they helped Mozilla. And it seems to me their "big splash" launches of late (App Engine, Docs, Wave, Buzz, checkout) end up underwhelming maybe because of the hype. Their successes (Gmail, maps, text ads) in my perception were more like "soft" launches in which they let the blogosphere and geeks in general do their promoting for them.
Diaspora is yet to show up anything, they have created hype though but nothing visible till date. Google certainly is not going to say anything to be the facebook killer, they will just introduce something and if that works that's great, and if that doesn't its just ok, it will not make much difference until it succeed, failure for Google in this space doesn't make any difference. It is the advantage of being Google.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadwww.orkut.com
Also, it didn't start out as a Brazilian social network, not sure where the article got that.
Livejournal had a Russian invasion, Flickr had an early invasion of kids from the U.A.E. and was blocked there for a while, Xanga went asian, Bebo went British.
You can't really predict how localized network effects will transform a globally-accessible online community.
Will it be called FaceOverflow?
I think with buzz they are trying to make a service which brings all the features of the various social networks to one platform, its something between Facebook (you can "like" stuff), tumblr (judging by the length of the posts and it allows comments), and twitter.
I have to say that buzz is really nice, and I would use it if it didn't have the gmail requirement.
Since then products have almost inevitably become killers sort of by accident, especially in the fast-moving and uncertain age of the web. Making a killer thus is kind of like skating to where the puck has been, not where it is going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa5xuQZnmtE
Oh, and wasn't Facebook about to launch a Google killer the other day..?