An interesting alternative lurcking in the wings - from Bloomberg:
The Man Behind Orkut Says His ‘Hello’ Platform Doesn’t Sell User Data
In 2004, one of the world’s most popular social networks, Orkut, was founded by a former Google employee named Orkut Büyükkökten. Later that year, a Harvard University student named Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘the Facebook’, which over the course of a year became ubiquitous in Ivy League universities and was eventually called Facebook.com.
Orkut was shut down by Google in 2014, but in its heyday, the network had hit 300 million users around the world. Facebook took five years to achieve that feat. At a time when the #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining traction worldwide in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Orkut has made a comeback by launching a new social network in India. Say hello to “Hello”.
“Hello.com is a spiritual successor of Orkut.com,” Büyükkökten told BloombergQuint. “The most important thing about Orkut was communities, because they brought people together around topics and things that interested them and provided a safe place for people to exchange ideas and share genuine passions and feelings. We have built the entire ‘Hello’ experience around communities and passions and see it as Orkut 2.0.”
Sounds good - if they can resist the temptation to commercialize by aggregating user data and selling it, they should do OK. I like the community idea - something a bit more regulated than Reddit. Reddit is a lot of fun but it is a bit Wild West for my tastes.
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