Most people in the UK have probably never heard of Orkut, the Google owned social network has never seen much traffic from the UK. However, in other parts of the world where social networking is not dominated by Facebook it’s a very important service. Orkut has over 100 million users across the globe and is by far the most used social network in Brazil. Popular as it is it’s actually losing users to Facebook every day, recently losing its number one spot in India to the global power of Facebook, but recent upgrades to the service suggest Google isn’t ready to give up on the service just yet.
The latest signifcant update to Orkut looks to address the issue that as we connect with different groups of friends through social networks we lose our ability to communicate different personas to different groups within our network. People represent themselves in very different ways to different groups of people in conventional settings. For example peoples’ persona displayed to their children is very different to the persona they display to their work collegues, however, as all these people become grouped together as a single group of ‘Facebook friends’ a single persona portrayed through their profile is displayed to all.
It’s possible to under take some serious privacy setting changes on Facebook to ensure certain communication only reaches a certain group, but this can take a lot of time, and the process usually ends up allowing you to communicate one persona to a select group whilst blocking outgoing communication with all others. Orkut looks to make things easier and helps you to maintain separate active identities by letting you maually create or automatically (based on your social graph) generate your different social groups, then with every peice of content you post from status updates to photos Orkut asks you which groups you want to share with.
It seems unlikley that the feature will draw the masses from Facebook and over to Orkut anytime soon, but as more people share more and more information while at the same time become more aware of their online identity we might see the concept appear in other services, maybe even Facebook.
