It is interesting to see how Social Networking (SN) sites evolve.

Friendster took off like a rocketship when it launched. It was out of control – everyone was on it and everyone was talking about it. Then techonology problems (like an excruciatingly slow site) caused it to fall off a cliff. But, if you look at the graph below (from Alexa), they are reemerging…

Orkut, Google’s venture into SN, also took off with a ton of press about Orkut Biakutten. Everyone I knew logged on, added all their friends and then, maybe 6 months later, everyone got tired of it and stopped. Primarily because there was no point.

But Orkut is *huge* in certain places. The well known one is Brazil, but they are actually also huge in India. All the evidence is anecdotal. Go to most any Indian blog and you will see mentions of Orkut. I also get a fair amount of messages from Indians on Orkut. Actually, looking at the Alexa numbers, there’s been an incredible spike as of Q2 of 2006. Why?

And comparing Friendster versus Orkut, you can see that Orkut has clearly taken off.

Here’s an interesting blurb from ZDNet News (from July ’06):

In May, Orkut had 210,000 visitors in the United States, up 85 percent from the year earlier, according to ComScore.

Worldwide, Orkut enjoyed more popularity. It ranked fifth in May by ComScore’s measure, more than doubling its visitors for the year to 33.7 million. In contrast, MSN Spaces doubled its visitors to 101 million, and MySpace grew 250 percent to 74 million, according to ComScore.

Wow — US traffic is smaller than a speck of dust. Incredible how significant international growth is.

The only SN site that seems impervious to cycles is the juggernaut, MySpace.