Critical mass vs network effects
Most people don’t remember this, but Google had a social network that predated Google+. In fact, Google’s social network launched a few months before TheFacebook launched as a Harvard-only site.
Google’s social network was called: Orkut. Orkut was invite-only, and the day it launched, an Orkut invite was a hot commodity in silicon valley. I seem to recall I was lucky enough to be one of the first few thousand users.
It was fun to use at first, but within months of launch, the user community started to change. I remember that as it started to really grow, I began getting several new friend requests a day… all written in portuguese. As the community rapidly changed, a lot of early users, including me, stopped using the site. Check out these demographic charts if you think I am exaggerating.
Wait a second, the conventional wisdom is that more users makes a community more valuable? Well, not in this case. US traffic and usage dropped like a rock. Orkut became an embarrassment to Google, and they quietly stopped talking about it. In fact, many people believe that Google stayed out of “the social networking space” for as long as they did because of how poorly they fared with Orkut. I wonder if Facebook would exist in its current form if Google had managed its nascent social strategy differently. Possibly not.
