EightBlack.

I was hoping this session would erupt into a violent slanging match. After all, when you put very smart dudes from Faccebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut and Six Apart all together, disagreement is sure to take place.

But nothing. They were actually quite civil to each other. I blame Justin Smith - the panel moderator. His questions were far too polite. If I was ever allowed to moderate one of these panels, I’d get all the panelists semi-drunk at lunch and then promptly insult them right from the start. But that’s just me.

Anyway.

Most of us identify with with the 2 big social networking players - Facebook and MySpace.

Bebo is an interesting story (the name stands for Blog Early, Blog Often). It started out back in January 2005 by a husband and wife team, was “re-launched” in July of that year and just over 3 years later, ie March 2008, was sold to AOL for US$850 million.

Orkut is Google’s foray into the social networking pond. They’ve clearly got some very bright people working on it, but intelligence is one thing, traction and scale is another. It was name after the Google employee who created it, Orkut Büyükkökten.

According to Wikipedia, Orkut is the most visited site in Brazil. And the second most visited site in India. Apparently, Orkut was originally intended for the US market, but it obviously didn’t work out that way. Maybe Orkut the creator didn’t read the internal memo correctly when he built it. Maybe he’d had too many Turkish coffees that day.

Like a lot of the great things that come out of Google, Orkut built Orkut in his 20% time.

Interestingly enough, Orkut’s previous company, Affinity Engines, filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that Orkut the app contained 9 identical bugs from Affinity’s social app - InCircle.

Google’s finance department then got involved, cut what was probably a big enough check, and Affinity went away. Or something like that.

Ok, back to the session.

The questions still unanswered for me are these. Is there room for all these social networking sites? Who will be here in 3 years time and who will have bitten the digital dust? How does Corporate (you insert the country here) make money with social networking, What’s Google’s long term play with social networking? Because you can’t tell me that they’ll be happy with Orkut and being the number one and two site in places like Brazil and India.

The session went for 50 minutes but I’ve only posted 20 minutes here.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Social Networking, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.