Wednesday, October 25, 2006

What about Orkut?

These days, I am wondering what Google plans to do with Orkut, one of the older socializing platforms with about 30 million users worldwide. While about two thirds of the users seem to be located in Brazil (with about 9% of the country's population being registered), about 15% of the users are located in India, and only 10% of the users are from the US.

Related to the rising number of users are also attempts to create fake accounts, which may be a general problem with socializing platforms - as the issue of fictional identities is well-known. With the acquisition of YouTube and its much larger user base than Orkut, I am wondering if Google has any plans to merge both platforms, perhaps also including Dodgeball, which it had acquired in May of last year and is apparently integrating dodgeball accounts into their service portfolio.

With all those socializing services around, we seem to need a meta-integrator of user profiles. Which reminds me of Apple that received a patent for portable user accounts.

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