Orkut is dead.

First off, I'm obsessed with online communities - my profile, others' profiles, how many friends I have, what groups I join, etc... HELP!

2 weekends ago I joined MySpace. I obsessed over my profile, and found some old friends. I still haven't gotten Alex to put up a picture. I'm trying.

This past weekend I joined Orkut. The online community that requires an invitation to join. This of course inhibits its growth and popularity, but I think that's what they're going for. Keep out the spammers and all that, not that it works. There's plenty of spammers there. Browsing the groups and members, I noticed that there was a fairly large Brazilian base. I suppose that's not too strange. Then I noticed that ALL news bulletins from Orkut, and almost all groups have portugese descriptions. So today I ran across this! Almost 73% of the members are Brazilian! (And only 11% are from the US, mostly from CA - I assume Google employees.)

I found a few people I know on there, but their profiles look abandoned. I wanted to join the Cornell Jewish Students/Alumni group, but their last post was in 2004! The other groups I joined have a lot of 1 message threads (if you can call them that)... someone will post a question/discussion topic, and no one will ever respond. Pretty sad. I'm sure it's more lively in the Brazilian groups.

So I think I'll pass on Orkut. I'll keep my profile up, and check on my groups occasionally, but until more people show up there, it's really pointless.