Insights from Vibhu

Orkuts’ growth was driving by recruiting influencers to their platform and paying them to generate content
- Influential writers for news columns
Initial community that gets seeded drives the DNA of the community that crystallizes around it
It is possible to have two drastically different communities on the same platform
- Brazil community on Orkut was focused on something else
- India’s community on Orkut was focused on sharing code and resume
Google does not understand social networks. Seeing from the functional perspective, pieces of code that serves as social proofing will appear as inefficient, unnecessary and redundant thus removed
The nuances of UX is not often appreciated by the engineering community