Or-What??? Facebook’s secret runt twin: Orkut

When I joined Facebook awhile back, I thought it would be interesting to create a group for the Kneb family, just to see what would happen.

Well it took 6 months but finally one of our long lost cousins in France found us! We knew instantly we were related because really, how many people could there be out there with a last name like ours?!

It’s been an interesting couple of days as we’ve traced back our lineages in funny exchanges of half-English and half-French. Michel and I have figured out that our great-great-grandfathers, Benedykt (mine) and Guillaume (his – probably ‘Wilhelm’ in Poland) were brothers. One of Guillaume’s progeny emigrated to France and another to Brazil, hence the growth of those branches.

In one of our messages, Michel told me to go search our family name on ‘Orkut’ and I’d find more Knebs.

Or-What???

Apparently there are places in this world where people aren’t inundated with pokes, Funwall posts and invitations to join inane applications which enable you to throw sheep at one another.

Places like Brazil and India.

‘Cause that’s where Orkut enjoys a strange and wild popularity.

Orkut is an Internet social network service which is run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. [...] Similar to Facebook, Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-set-up simple forums (called “communities”) of users. Source: Wikipedia

Run by GOOGLE, no less!?

Orkut has been around since October 2006 January 2004. That’s almost 2 years after the around the same time as the birth of Facebook which is, as you probably know, the number one time-sucker for North Americans. It was purported to have over 67 million users in August 2007!

So how come lil’ ol’ me here in Canada had never heard of Orkut until today?

Should I be embarrassed?

I did consider myself to be relatively Web 2.0-saavy. I mean, I know about Twitter and Pownce and smugmug and Ooma and Lypp and a whole bunch of other stuff with really stupid names. Am I losing touch?

Apparently there’s no need to worry. Orkut was just an unfortunate victim of one of those freak phenomenons where one country goes ga-ga over an application/trend/way of life, to the exclusion of everyone else.

Orkut is the most visited website in Brazil, being more visited than Google Brazil, number 2 on the list. In total visits, Google is probably still more popular since it appears as the second (the Brazilian version) and seventh most visited site (the international version). The initial target market for orkut was the United States, but the majority of its users are in Brazil. In fact, as of January 2008, 55.32% of the traffic come from Brazil, followed by 16.53% from India. Source: Wikipedia

So it makes perfect sense that while me and my Canadian cousins were writing on each other’s walls and inviting each other to ’slap, hug or tickle’ one another on Facebook, our Brazilian relatives were leaving each other ’scraps’ on Orkut.

Though we don’t really know much about it over on this side of the pond, Orkut may one day turn out to be a social networking heavyweight to be reckoned with here, too.

In the meantime, now that a couple of us Knebs have bridged the gap between the branches of our family tree, it will be interesting to see what middle ground we will choose.

Maybe *gasp!* it will be good ol’ fashioned… email??