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Why Orkut is beating Facebook and MySpace in India
Nov 1, 2007
Facebook and MySpace, as popular as they are, aren't the only popular social networking services out there. Google runs a service called Orkut, though relatively few people use it in the US.
Here's why Orkut is more popular than Facebook in India and Brazil:
...many [Indian users] get online at access speeds as slow as 15 kilobits per second. (About what AOL members in the U.S. were at in 1990.) His own dialup line is an only slightly-less-pokey 28K.
Nayak says "Orkut is much lighter than Facebook," meaning it is better designed to be used on a slow dialup line. While getting onto Orkut takes about a minute and a half for him, Facebook takes a minute longer. And getting on MySpace takes him five minutes.
For years, many Web designers have resisted the common-sense suggestion to go easy on the bells and whistles. Maybe there's an urge to express one's artistic vision, but is it worth losing a market of several hundred million users?
P.S. Another popular service in Brazil is fotolog.net. It's for sharing photos, but the simple design makes the page load quickly.
This is a problem with so many things these days. Making things more complicated does not necessarily make them better.
yes, but not necessarily popular either. Page speed means very little to the millions of folks on broadband, who dont have these problems. Often they are looking for something more. So it may be a choice between going after 2 markets, rather than choosing one.
Simplicity is not the driving factor for popular adoption, rather peer-recommendations can come into play in this instance.
It's the good old "more is more" mentality, always "bigger and better". That is why computers and cars are full of features that we don't need, and why we have to face 100 different choices when we only want a simple tube of toothpaste. There is too much clutter everywhere...and websites are no exception. Great blog, by the way...