Where’s the Orkut Platform?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on April 8th, 2008 5:00 PMOn a conference call announcing the Open Social foundation a couple weeks ago, Joe Kraus of Google at one point mentioned that Orkut would be launching their platform the same week that Hi5 did. Since then Google has been quiet about Orkut. A post on the Orkut developer blog states that they’ve discovered and fixed new bugs and the launch will be soon. There is no date anymore on the launch but one week prior to launching the platform Google will announce it on the Orkut blog.
It has been challenging for Orkut to launch and based on the feedback from a number of developers that I’ve spoken with, rushing to launch on other platforms isn’t really a high priority anymore as they are realizing that the growth is not as viral as it was on Facebook. I’ve also heard mixed feedback about the Hi5 platform and other platforms but then again for the leaders on the platform they have a nice head start but that’s about it.
I’m not quite sure what’s holding Orkut back but considering it’s Google’s platform they should probably be first to launch since they invented the OpenSocial standard. Regardless, it appears as though Facebook is continuing to dominate the social platforms. It will be interesting to see if OpenSocial can gain momentum as other platforms launch and more viral channels are opened. Do you use Orkut? Are you a developer of an app that’s about to launch on Orkut? What do you think the future holds for this platform?
April 9th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I don’t personally use Orkut, but yes we’re launching our OpenSocial app on Orkut (it’s live now on MySpace and hi5, see http://www.amnestywidgets.com/HypercubeOS.html). Because we had already ported the app from Facebook to Friendster the move to OpenSocial wasn’t too much work (Facebook specific code had already been identied and replaced). Most of our work for Orkut was providing a Portuguese translation so that we cover as many of Orkut’s existing users as possible.
True, the platforms are rolling out slowly and the user uptake is slow compared to Facebook, but competition is always good for the enduser.
Although I have no confirmation of this, my gut tells me Google will be migrating iGoogle (which has a mindboggling huge user base) to OpenSocial. That will make moving to OpenSocial much more attractive to app developers.