Social-networking in Brazil

Here's a point of interest, internationally speaking: It doesn't matter if a US-based social-networking site didn't really take off in the US. San Francisco-based Bebo.com is the hot social-networking site in the UK and Mountain View, Calif.-based Orkut.com is the hot social-networking site in Brazil. "Orkut, the invention of a Turkish-born software engineer [at Google] named Orkut Buyukkokten, never really caught on in the United States, where MySpace rules teenage cyberspace. But it is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Brazil," the New York Times reports, adding that 11 million of the site's 15 million users are social-networking in Portuguese (well, they're in Brazil, anyway, where the site's name is pronounced "or-KOO-chee"). Of course, humanity being the way it is, there's a backlash: "Almost as soon as Brazilians started taking over Orkut in 2004 — and long before April 2005, when Google made Orkut available in Portuguese — English-speaking users formed virulently anti-Brazilian communities like 'Too Many Brazilians on Orkut'." What one social-networker doesn't like, undoubtedly others are finding very cool. Penpals, Web 2.0-style! Meanwhile, The Sunday Times of London reports that Bebo's some 22 million users now include some 500,000 in Ireland, and SiliconRepublic.com reports that Bebo's will be among the "senior executives from global internet giants Google, eBay, [and] Yahoo" who will "descend on" Dublin next month to "discuss the impact and future of the internet at an Internet industry conference." (See also "Bebo craze in UK.")