Brazil and Orkut

The GNOME Brazilian Hit Squad jumped on me for my comment of last night that Orkut doesn’t get used. I knew that Brazilians love Orkut, and Johan told me that there is a group in Orkut that has 1.1 million members. GNOME went through an Orkut phase, which lasted… what, about two weeks? So it wasn’t much of an experience. In contrast, as far as I can tell, my soon-to-be-peers in law school use facebook a lot- the Columbia Law School ’09 group has been very active, even though it has only existed for a week. I assume this must be the kind of experience that Orkut users in Brazil have, but I’ve never seen it in any social networking tool I’ve used. What I should have said, then, was that I’ve never used a social software web service that is really used by my friends or peers. Looking forward to the learning experience.