The Orkut explosion 

The Orkut explosion

The orkut community has seen a surge of Brazilian users registering and using the service. This is a well-known and curious fact. Brazilian users have reached 72.72% of the total users. This is followed by the United States, with about 10.92%.

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Because of the number of Brazilian users and communities using Portuguese, users from other parts of the world became upset with the service, when Portuguese became the first "alternate default language" with English as the primary default language. This prompted many community owners to create English-only posting policies. Some went so far as to start communities and discussion groups dedicated to complaining about this phenomenon. Hoaxes have spread, with the intent of tricking Brazilian users into changing their nationality on orkut.

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With the surge of Brazilian users, Orkut recently introduced Portuguese as the second language to its interface. This was in response to countless requests.

According to some, Orkut has become popular in Estonia where greater than 3% (June 2005) of the population are registered users of Orkut. This is the highest percentage for any single country. Brazil holds second place at about 2.5%. All other countries in the top 10 have users amounting to less than 0.5%.

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In a recent interview for a Brazilian news website, the creator of Orkut said he doesn't understand the phenomenon. He complains the North-American press and users are ignoring the service. Instead, they use similar services such as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. He noted Brazil is actually the main focus of orkut.

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