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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Let's see how many Google products with massive social components I can come up with:

  Gmail obviously
  Youtube obviously
  Earth has a huge community building layers
  Maps is used and embedded by every other social service out there
  Blogger of course
  Groups of course
  Knol, though I guess you can call it a failure
  Orkut is massive in Brazil
  Picasa photo sharing
  Reader has sharing
  Talk obviously

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I'd say: (almost) none of these.

GMail is a utility. Same with Earth, Maps (we're talking about social components for users, not for developers), Blogger (Tumblr, that is based on a social component!), Groups, Reader and Talk.

Social sharing in YouTube is extremely limited. I save my YouTube favourite videos on delicious, just to give you an idea, and never receive more than one suggestion a month about a video from the community.

Knol is a failure.

Orkut is strong only in Brazil (and India, perhaps) and is largely the (free) Brazilian AdultFriendFinder (you dive deep into it, and then you tell me).

YouTube for me is only social in the sense that the videos I like get fed to my Facebook stream. I have no connection with my friends or family from within Youtube and the quality of comments is so dreadful it makes me feel like I don't want any presence there whatsoever.

Interesting point about Orkut. I wonder if there is a Google Dating in the works. It seems to fit their mission of organizing and helping people search-- one of the most important search tasks in most people's lives actually. It's also inherently a panda task since you have a clear, stated objective that you want to accomplish and then move on.

Love to see "I'm feeling Lucky" on that site.

So you are defining 'social components' as within the user space of the Internet proper. The author seems to be defining the user space as a single branded site.

One difference is this: Google creates products that are designed to be shared via URLs. Other companies are really good at keeping their users logged in to their domains while users share with each other.

Orkut used to be big in India, too, but Facebook killed them there: http://www.google.com/trends?q=orkut,+facebook&geo=ind&#...

I've heard from a number of people the same thing is happening in Brazil. Here's one report citing 800% growth in Brazil: http://www.breakingnewsonline.net/technology/2836-facebook-v...

The 'big agency creatives' does not even mention orkut anymore in brazil. it's all facebook there too.

as soon as the die hard are gone, no one will even remember it.

right now it has the same public that 'photolog' had a while ago (i.e. poor teens)

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