Why everyone on Orkut is Brazilian
In the earliest days of Orkut (Google’s also-ran entry into social networking), the property managers featured a fun little widget at the top of the site: a country-counter, showing members’ geographical origins. Cute, right? Harmless, certainly. Google had no way of knowing, however, that the entire population of Brazil would make it a point of national pride to push their country to the top of that list! Brazilian blogger Naitze Teng writes: “Communities dedicated to raising the number of Brazilians on Orkut were following the numbers closely, planning gatherings and flash mobs to coincide with the inevitable. When it was reported that Brazilians had outnumbered Americans registered on Orkut, parties […] were thrown in celebration.”
Today, Brazil maintains its number one position on Orkut (51% of Orkut users are Brazilian as of this writing—the US and India are tied for a distant second with 17% apiece.) Orkut is—basically—a Brazilian social network. Which is not a bad “problem” for Google to have, but probably never an outcome they would have expected from such a simple, small and insignificant thing as a leaderboard widget.
from Building Web 2.0 Reputations Systems (via buzz)
