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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand Orkut adoption at the moment is limited pretty much to just Brazil. Orkut simply had it coming for a looong time.

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Not anymore. Even in Brazil, Orkut in dying and almost nobody use it anymore. Nowadays Facebook is the main social network in Brazil.

Brazil isn't exactly Luxembourg. Surely a population of 200 million isn't to be sniffed at.

but to google, 200M means their possible market size is really a fraction of that. Imagine 30M MAX users, assuming super high penetration. Google wants to focus on BILLIONS of users, not tens of millions.

They're migrating to facebook. Social networks don't make sense if they're nation limited, be it de facto or by design. People will migrate to the biggest most popular one eventually. I suspect facebook is just the best (by some people's standards) social network and social networking eventually falls into a natural monopoly.

As a counterpoint, I don't think China will ever migrate en masse to Facebook.

And possibly Russia? Can anyone comment on how VKontakte is doing?

VK is the social network in Russia and probably in whole ex-USSR.

Censorship states will probably buck the trend due to the politics of migrating.

Taiwan and Hong Kong have. If Facebook wasn't blocked in China, you would assume that trend would have continued.

If Facebook were de-blocked today, you might very well see a mass migration. All my students (Chinese high schoolers and college transfers) going abroad immediately send me friend requests as soon as they get out from behind the Great Firewall.

Couldn't that be because once abroad, everyone they interact with are on Facebook?

If you would have said Belgium, I would have been able to say this…

"In the 1970s, economist Edmar Bacha popularised the term "Belindia" as a description of Brazil: a little bit of Belgium and a lot of India, the country was very rich for some and very poor for most."

Speaking of rich and poor, data from the recent Brazil x Chile World Cup game shows that most Brazilian stadium attendees were white (67%), mid-high/high class (90%), and well-educated (86%). Ok, now I'm officially off-topic. Carry on.

How did you get the 67% white info of attendees?

Third paragraph - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/sports/worldcup/most-fans-...

It was from Datafolha, the data section of Folha, a large Brazilian newspaper.

The issue isn't whether or not Orkut had it coming.

It's that YouTube, G+, and Blogger are what did it in.

Look, let me tell you a little secret.

Just, don't tell anyone, OK?

I mean, between you and me.

I think it might have been Facebook.

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