Wednesday, June 21, 2006

India's growth in Orkut

This post is in continuation to my post on Orkut.

Here are some statistics about % of orkut members :

Brazil : 68.26%
United States : 12.50%
India : 5.40%
Pakistan : 1.99%
Iran : 1.66%
Source : http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx as on 1940 hrs IST 19th June, 2006.

United States 43.11%
Brazil 15.02%
Japan 5.66%
Netherlands 3.49%
United Kingdom 3.28%
India 2.97%
As on 5/14/2004 as claimed by a post on http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=34264&tid=5622

Indian presence is growing faster than Orkut's growth. And given India's population, I figure there's still room for a lot of growth.

Do you know what could cause the rapid growth of orkut in India ??

Some more data about orkut is at http://www.anthonyhempell.com/papers/orkut/

Update:
1. Percentage of users on orkut from U.S. (13.03%) is now(July 25,2006 1544 IST) less than double than that of Indians (6.85%)!

2. I don't know how many of you are following this, but for Indians it has become easy to find their school-mates on orkut. This is because the percentage of orkut users from India is 7.12% (July 31,2006 1744 IST)

3. Right now, Indians have a share of 12% though still on 3rd position (December 11, 2006 1812 IST)

4. 12.69% Indians as against 16.9% from US on January 15,2007 2100 IST

5. Orkut demographics -> 15.22% from India, 18.92% from United States, 1.32% from Pakistan and 1st is still Brazil with lion's share of 55.48% as on June 19, 2007 0720 IST

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Teen Sues MySpace Over Sexual Assault

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

Founded in 2003, MySpace has more than 80 million registered users worldwide and is the world's third most-viewed Web site, according to the lawsuit. To create an account, a MySpace user must list a name, an e-mail address, sex, country and date of birth.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

You Are What You Post

This post is in continuation to my post on Orkut

Do you give good Google? It's the preoccupation du jour as Google hits become the new Q ratings for the creative class. Search engines provide endless opportunities for ego surfing, Google bombing (influencing traffic so it spikes a particular site), and Google juicing (enhancing one's "brand" in the era of micro-celebrity). Follow someone too closely and you could be accused of being a Google stalker. Follow yourself too closely: Google narcissist.

But Googling people is also becoming a way for bosses and headhunters to do continuous and stealthy background checks on employees, no disclosure required. Google is an end run around discrimination laws, inasmuch as employers can find out all manner of information -- some of it for a nominal fee -- that is legally off limits in interviews: your age, your marital status, the value of your house (along with an aerial photograph of it), the average net worth of your neighbors, fraternity pranks, stuff you wrote in college, liens, bankruptcies, political affiliations, and the names and ages of your children.

Because anyone, anywhere, at any time can say anything about you on the Web, reputations are scarily open-source. And because entire companies dedicate themselves to recording every inch of information on the Web, it's becoming difficult to unplug from the Google matrix, let alone make anything on the Internet go away. "This takes people's own agency out of how they want to present themselves," says Alice Marwick, a technology consultant and PhD candidate in New York University's Culture & Communications Dept. The Internet started out with avatars and anonymity. Now online and offline are bleeding together. "It's consolidating personal information into the aggregate," says Marwick, even though "our social practices haven't figured out how to keep up with the technology."



Update : Some related information is available here

Saturday, June 10, 2006

Orkut

Today, I have completed 18 months and 18 days on orkut, with more than 1450 scraps, 28 fans , and more than 200 people in my friend list.

I was thinking for past few days about how does orkut earns? I asked many people about it but didn't got any reply except for :

This is the mastermind behind Orkut community.
Some facts about Orkut:
1)Orkut Buyukkokten(the creator of Orkut) gets $12 when every person registers to this website.
2)He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
3)He gets $8 when your friend's friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as a friend in the resulting chain.
4)He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
5)He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
6)He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
7)He gets $2 when you become somebody's fan.
8)He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
9)He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.
10)He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
11)He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend's scrap-book & $0.5every time you view your friend's friend-list.
12)Many Global Financial Consultants think this person might become the richest-person in the world by the end of 2009.

But an obvious question is : Who pays him this money? Google ??? Why ???

Other question that came to my mind were :

1) How does Orkut earns?
2) Google still earns no revenues on Orkut. Why ???
3) Nearly two in three registered Orkut users hail from Brazil. Why would Orkut be so popular in Brazil?
4) What problems might Orkut solve that Google would otherwise find significantly more challenging?

Just think about it for a few minutes. If you've been thru the Orkut registration process, you know that it attempts to collect a ton of data about you.

This is a pretty good insight into some of the dangers of social networking and website customisation -- marketing and loss of privacy. When marketeers know who your friends are and what you are all into, it makes their advertising a lot more effective. Why is MySpace worth over half a billion dollars without a proper revenue model? Why is Digg allegedly pitched at over $20m (at the last count) without any idea of where money is going to be pulled from? The answer is - data. Information. Marketing. Every detail about you and me. That is where the money is.

What will happen if tomorrow we get something as orkut.google.com API for marketers ??

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Please reply to me on mitanshu.garg[at]googlemail.com

Update : Visit a nice post at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-06-12-n85.html