Interestingly enough, Google just announced a new iPhone (and iPod Touch) app for Orkut. On the Orkut Blog, Google engineer Ralf Botchen writes:

With this version, you can access your friends’ profiles, scraps, updates, birthdays, and even take pictures and send it directly to your Orkut albums. As always, your feedback is very important so please send us your comments and help us make an even better Orkut for you.

Download the new Orkut app today and stay connected with your friends and family anytime, anywhere – and get an exclusive badge to personalize your Orkut profile!

Orkut doesn’t get a lot of attention here in the U.S., especially in light of Google’s later social offerings (of course Google+ these days), but while Google has shut down things like Google Wave and Google Buzz, Orkut has remained, with a strong user base in Brazil.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook makes Orkut irrelevant in that country .

While such facts are well known by people who follow the social media industry, actually seeing such use mapped out provides an entirely new perspective. Thanks to the efforts of Ian Wojtowicz, a visual arts student, we now know what the lack of Facebook use looks like on a global scale. Wojtowicz’ work was featured at FlowingData.com, and it’s an ingenious method of extrapolating and visualizing data about Facebook’s use.

The map, which leads this article, was developed by mashing up NASA’s earth at night map with Facebook’s friendship map. The results are not only nice to look at, but they are also quite revealing as well. Before that, however, here’s a description of Wojtowicz’ legend.

Quite simply, the darker regions are active with Facebook use, while the yellow dots represent non-Facebook use. Feel free to enlarge the map by clicking on it, but, be warned, the larger map is almost four megabytes in size. Keep that in mind if you have a slow Internet connection:

What did we learn from Wojtowicz’ map? China, among other regions, is not a Facebook-friendly area. The social media network of choice for China’s citizens is RenRen.com. The lack of Facebook use in China only makes sense when you consider the iron-clad grip with which the flow of information is controlled. Not only does China eschew Facebook, but so does a large portion of the Asian continent.

In Russia, VKontakte is the social network of choice, and it apparently owes a great deal of credit to the Facebook designers, which it liberally borrows from, down to the almost the exact same shade of blue. According to a comScore report from 2009, VKontakte had 14 million users, a number that has undoubtedly increased in the two years since the report was published.

The preference for VKontakte also demonstrates why Facebook usage is so low in what was once known as the Soviet Union.

Another area where yellow dots — non-Facebook use — is strong is in Brazil. The social media outlet of choice in that region, an area well known for its widespread social media use, is Google’s Orkut. With that in mind, who says Google can’t develop a successful social media network?

Are there an areas that surprise you by their lack of Facebook use? Can Facebook make in-roads to these areas, well, maybe not China, but what about Russia and Brazil? Let us know what you think.

The post on the Orkut Blog stated, "Today marks orkut’s 7th birthday, so to celebrate, we released a new doodle in orkut.  We’d like to thank our users, and to let you know we are here working hard on making orkut better for you."

It’s possible to interpret this development in at least a couple ways.  First is to take the note at face value, accepting that Google remains pleased with and dedicated to its most successful social product yet.  Which is fair enough.

A couple more speculative stances: the lack of hoopla and so much as a single tweak to announce means Google’s social people have been redirected to work on a new project.  Or that they’ve just run out of ideas.

Anyway, we’d like to take a moment to point out the humorous use of a "beta" tag in the doodle.

Congrats to the Orkut team, as well, since to be fair, they have succeeded in attracting a much bigger audience in some countries than homegrown competitors.

With a share of 5.26 percent, Facebook now ranks as the third most popular site in India in terms of visits.  Only Google India and Google command higher visits shares (11.13 percent and 7.61 percent, respectively), which is hardly anything for Mark Zuckerberg to feel bad about.

Orkut, meanwhile, just barely makes a top ten list with a visits share of 1.29 percent.  That’s about one-fourth of Facebook’s figure.

So it’s safe to say that Facebook’s in pretty good shape.  An Experian Hitwise representative observed in an email to WebProNews, "The site accounted for more than one third of all Indian visits to social networks . . . picking up over twice as many visits as second placed YouTube."

This represents a tough loss for Google, further calling its social media competence into question.

A hat tip goes to Akanksha Awal, in any event.

The lawsuit revolved around several fake profiles set up in Barrichello’s name.  They ridiculed him for being second driver (or more specifically, second fiddle) to Michael Schumacher, and Google wasn’t quick to take the profiles down, despite being notified.

As a result, "A Sao Paulo court ruled that Google took too long to remove fake profiles mocking Barrichello from its website," according to a Grandprix.com article.

Barrichello was awarded $118,000.

Google appears to be suffering something of a losing streak with Orkut.  Consider that comScore recently indicated the network lost its popularity lead to Facebook in India.  Now there’s this lawsuit in Brazil, the only other big country in which Orkut’s been on top.

These developments don’t set the stage for the best possible Google Me launch.  On the bright side (from Google’s perspective), $118,000 isn’t too much to a company with a market cap of $196 billion, and fake profiles aren’t the worst problem a social network has ever had to deal with.

Some believe the new features may represent some general social media thinking on Google’s part, which could potentially make an appearance in Google’s rumored "Google Me" social media project. This is purely speculation, but certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

Orkut now lets users group friends, as seen in the following clip:

"To make it easier for you to interact with your groups of friends, now you can open them from your homepage. Your groups will always be a click away from you, on the top of the page," explains Orkut product management director Victor Ribeiro. "When you click a group (for example, ‘college friends’), you’ll see updates, photos, videos and activities only from people who are part of that group. If you want to write them something, the scrap editor will automatically select everyone in the group and the privacy will be set to "Private" so you can share information that is relevant to that group only. And, of course, you can change that privacy setting before sending the message."

"We know that sometimes we invite someone from work to a family party or we bring a gym friend to the office happy hour. That means: sometimes our groups of friends mix together. Thinking of this, you can easily add or remove as many people as you want from the recipients of a scrap," adds Ribeiro. "Oh, and yes, remember that the groups are yours only. Nobody else will know the names of your groups of friends. When you send something to the entire group, people will know who else can see the message, but they will not know the name you chose for the group within your orkut. Also, you can change and edit your groups whenever you want, the way you want it!"

Facebook lets you group friends, and Twitter has lists, but these are more designed for your intake of information, as opposed to your output. If you tweet or post a status update, it’s still going to all of your friends/followers.

Ribeiro talks about more new Orkut features here.

According to comScore, Orkut attracted around 19.9 million unique visitors in July.  Facebook bested that by attracting closer to 20.9 million people, and that gave Facebook the top spot in the "Top Social Networking Sites in India" category for the first time ever.

Facebook doesn’t appear to be running out of steam, either.  comScore said in a statement, "Facebook.com posted an especially strong month in July, growing 12 percent versus June, to capture the top spot in the category with 20.9 million visitors."

That’s very bad news for Google.  India’s home to a whole lot of Internet users – comScore considers it "the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking" – and any loss of mindshare has the potential to translate into a lot of missed marketing opportunities.

Also, as Google (allegedly) builds a new social network meant to take on Facebook, this development undermines whatever small amount of social credibility the company had.

The one detail that might work in Google’s favor is comScore’s disclaimer about public computers (see the small print below the chart).  Internet cafes are popular in India, so it’s possible Orkut has a lot of fans who just weren’t counted.

The BBC has produced an attractive visual display on the rise and fall of social networks using metrics from market researcher Nielsen in June as its source.

As the chart here on the top five social networks by country shows, Facebook dominates in six of the seven countries the BBC highlights – USA, Australia, Germany, UK, Spain and Italy. The difference in Brazil, where Orkut is the leader with Facebook a distant second.

Yet even as Facebook is king, and not even well liked in some countries, look at the other social networks. In Germany, for instance, 8.5 million people are members of VZNet Netzwerke which includes StudiVZ, the big network for young people. In Spain, 6.6 million are with Tuenti. Brazil, too, where 5.9 million are in iG Comunidades. And let’s not forget MySpace (which recently underwent a facelift) – it’s in second place in the USA, UK, Australia and Italy and third in Spain.

My point is simply a reminder that, from a business perspective in particular – notably, if you’re planning any kind of outreach or engagement activity in these countries – recognize that the dominant social network isn’t necessarily the only place where your engagees spend their time and exercise their influence – sizeable niche communities are elsewhere too.

Comments

A lot of folks in India and Brazil are likely to welcome this move, considering that Orkut is most popular in those two countries.  And since India and Brazil are the second- and fifth-most populous countries in the world, respectively, that fact’s nothing to shrug at.

It is interesting to consider what this means for Orkut in other regions, though.  After all, Google introduced a sharing feature involving Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader a year ago tomorrow, and it’s hard to believe that some sort of engineering challenge delayed the Orkut rollout.

It’s possible, then, that Google’s getting ready to carry out a push to make Orkut more accepted.  Or maybe an engineer just finally remembered he forgot something the first time around.

Anyway, with regards to the new sharing feature, a post on the Orkut Blog stated, "Auto-share is an easy way to tell your friends in real-time about the videos you’re liking, saving as favorites or commenting on; the channels you’re subscribing to; or even new videos you’re uploading to your own channel."

Fast-forward a few months

After the initial hype-fest died down, and the dust settled, most of the positive buzz has dissipated. What we’re left with are privacy concerns, a rampant spam problem and copyright issues from users. In an effort not to be totally negative in regards to Buzz, it should be noted that Google has been very quick addressing / fixing certain aspects of the service.

Do you think Google Buzz is a flop? Tell us what you think. 

This past week we asked the question, “Would you consider Google Buzz to be a flop?” on our WebProNews Facebook page. We were surprised by some of the answers left by our fans. My personal favorite comes from Steve Blaze; he states that Google Buzz is the biggest flop since the Edsel. (For those of unfamiliar with the Edsel, it was a brand of car from the Ford Motor Company with a disastrous history so therefore “Edsel” has become synonymous with failure).

One has to ask, why is Google having such a hard with social media? In many ways Google was a pioneer of social media, with their Orkut service (which is still immensely popular in both India and Brasil – but now the US where it counts).

Recently Chitika, an online advertising network, did some research within their network and found some interesting data pertaining to Buzz.

The report goes on to say… ”February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries.  The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147.  From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.  During the same time, searches for Twitter remained fairly stable, averaging about 87 searches per day.”

What are some possible fixes for Google Buzz?

Social media users want services that make there experience easier… not just another service that brings nothing new to the table. There are numerous things that Google could add / tweak to make Buzz more user friendly, specifically here are 5 things that I would like to see…

1.) Lists – Twitter has them and so should Buzz.
2.) Groups – Again, Twitter has them so should Buzz.
3.) Hide all comments – until I want to see comments" option.
4.) Comment moderation – block directly from the comments (like on FriendFeed).
5.) Content filter – Don’t show me any photos from Picasa or posts from a specific user.

Do you have any ideas to improve Google Buzz? Let us know what you got.

Something else that would’ve made this list is Buzz not pulling tweets in real-time. It appears as though this issue maybe getting fixed, a recent message from Josh Wills, an engineer on the Buzz team, explained…

"Okay, change is out everywhere. Here’s the scoop: we’re doing an experiment where we’re going to trust the timestamps on tweets (and by "experiment," I mean rolling it out to everyone, everywhere, all at once.) The net effect of this should be to do away with "tweet dumping", where you’re buzzing along and a whole bunch of tweets show up all at once because we just crawled them and push your page all around. Now, if a tweet shows up at the top of the stream, it will be because it just happened, or because a buzzer commented on it.

Personally, I really like Twitter, and I want better integration between Twitter and Buzz. My hope is that this is a temporary change until we work out a way to play nicely together that is beneficial to everyone."

So Google Buzz might not be exactly what we expected when it first launched earlier this year… but only time will tell if it becomes a major player in the social-space.

Do you see Google Buzz becoming a major player? Or will it just fizzle out? Tell us what you think.