where are the orkut members

When the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were doing a presentation at TED in 2004, a few months after Orkut launched, the social networking site’s members were dominated by users in the U.S., with 59% of the user base. But the hype didn’t last long in the U.S. Over the past three years, the percentage of users from the U.S. kept declining, with only 18% left as of today.

Google probably wants to give social networking another shot. Last year, they sponsored a project called the “Socialstream” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty.

After watching the demo video, it seems to me that Socialstream is more interesting than any other social networks out there. Like Ionut, I would like to see Google put this project online.

Well, then I might just be like, “Oh, yet another social network?” :)

[via Google Operating System]