Facebook vs. Orkut from a Brazilian’s Perspective
Having lived in Brazil my whole life, I believe it could be interesting to share this insider’s perspective on how Brazilians endured with Orkut while the whole world was already using Facebook as main online social network.
So, back in 2004 we started hearing at school about this online social network, in which all cool kids had an account. You needed an invite to sign up, so you had to be friends with someone popular who could share one of his precious invites for this secretive online society called Orkut. There was a point in which every Brazilian kid with access to the internet struggled to get an invite and setup their online proof of being cool.
Social status was all that mattered in the beginning – I think the main reason for Orkut not to work almost anywhere else in the world is because the service was so, so slow. You would literally need to click any link at least 10 times for it to work – the other 9 you would get the famigerated “Bad server, no donut for you” screen, the biggest terror in Brazilian kids’ minds. But Brazilian internet at that time was super slow anyways, so no one really noticed the problem was actually at the server’s side.
From there to around 2009, servers got a lot better, and the Orkut community really grew (people would use it just as we use Facebook today), to the point you would not need an invite to sign up anymore. It had all these amazing forums about anything, topics were well organized and (differently from Facebook, even six years later) the search engine worked flawlessly.
In 2010, however, people started noticing that we Brazilians were the only ones using that amazing social network. It is strange to think back and remember that yet again, the cool kids were the first to switch to Facebook. I wonder if that is some strategy Facebook took, or the popular kids just wanted to be as “cool” as European and American kids were. They said Facebook was “just way better” than Orkut, but could not really say why. I think the “cool” factor of being internationally more popular is what really determined Facebook’s victory in the beginning.
From 2010 to 2011 then, happened the real transition. Everyday your list of contacts using Orkut would diminish a little bit more. You would meet new people in real life, try to friend them on Orkut and they would never answer, because they had already transitioned.
I was one of the last few fighting for Orkut. It got to a point that, at around July 2011, there was only me and one of my friends still using Orkut. And he was kind of a weirdo, so I shockingly realised that people probably saw me as a weirdo too. It was time to accept defeat, and with my heart aching, I transitioned. I am sorry Orkut… I tried, I swear.
On July 30, 2014, despite countless shameful attempts from Google to keep it alive, the best social network ever created was finally euthanized.
R.I.P. Orkut. We miss you.
http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/facebook-beats-orkut-brazil/#SJV35EXLDqql