Orkut: Its all about data and "influencers"

There are a number of reasons a company like Google would launch a social networking site like Orkut.
You could imagine the company selling advertising within communities;for example there is a thriving community around the Simpsons, with thousands of members... it would make sense for there to be ads selling Simpsons DVDs, t-shirts, etc. With membership approaching the 1 million mark, this could help drive a little revenue for the company.

I believe that Google is getting something far more valuable from orkut, and that is data. A while back I commented about how the combination of Gmail, Blogger, Search, and Orkut was helping Google create a perfect profile of people.

What I failed to think about at the time is that Google could be collecting something much more valuable, information on who the "influencers" are in various countries. I define "Influencers" as the set of people that help to drive popular culture and define what is "cool". Apparently Orkut is VERY COOL in the country of Brazil. Over the past month hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have joined orkut. When Orkut was around 500,000 users (just a couple of weeks ago) Brazilians represented something like 25% of the user base. Today with Orkut having 883,000 member, Brazilians account for 43% of the users. That means the number of Brazilians has exploded from 125,000 to 380,000 in just a few weeks. When I do a search to see the number of users, I can seriously have a hard time finding new users that aren't from Brazil.

You may be asking "Ok, cool stats Mark, but why does this matter?". This matters because Google through the Orkut database can track back through the relationships in Orkut and determine what users where the "influencers". While there won't be a single "influencer" that made Orkut popular in Brazil, there will be a relatively small number. Now imagine the ability to buy advertising on an "influencers" home page... WOW! You want your product to become hip in a given country, buy advertising from Google and target those "influencers".