Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of December 2009, 51.09% of Orkut’s users are from Brazil, followed by India with 20.02% and United States with 17.28%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.

As of June 2010, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut 63rd in the world; the website currently has more than 100 million active users worldwide. Anyone of age above 13 years can join orkut.

Buzz enables users to choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a group of friends each time they post. Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed, identi.ca and Twitter are currently integrated. The creation of Buzz was seen by industry analysts as an attempt by Google to compete with social networking websites like Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.Buzz also includes several interface and interaction elements from other Google products (e.g. Google Reader) such as the ability to “like” a post.

Google executive Sergey Brin said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure, but the service and its rollout have been strongly criticized for taking insufficient account of privacy concerns.

In July 2008 Hyves announced that they had reached 7 million users, about 5 million of which were Dutch. This amounts to about a third of the entire population of The Netherlands. In 2007, the website was voted “most popular website of the year” in the “Website of the year” competition.^[2] In 2006 and 2007 Hyves also won another “Website of the year” competition in the category for blogs and communities.

Because of the popularity among young people, even politicians (among them Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende) have their own Hyve. They see this as an opportunity to come closer to the people of a younger generation. As a result of the immense growth of users, the site is regularly subjected to performance problems since the 3 million users barrier has broken. This results in incorrect working links and the slow loading of pages.

According to a study of WatchMouse published on the 11th of January 2008, Hyves now ranks among the faster social networking sites. At that time the site had over 5.5 million registered users. As of August 2009, Hyves has over 9 million registered users.

A lot of well-known Dutch people have a profile on Hyves like some politicians and singers, to promote themselves.

Cozi was co-founded by Robbie Cape and Jan Miksovsky after the two of them left Microsoft. Most of the company’s employees worked previously at Amazon.com, Expedia, or Microsoft. The company’s first product was called Cozi Central and released on September 25, 2006, and includes a family calendar, shopping lists, family messaging, and a photo collage screensaver. Cozi was relaunched as a web-oriented company on June 3, 2008.

Corporate Culture

Cozi uses Tupperware-style events called Mom’s parties to conduct market research.

The company is unusual among technology start-ups in that it employs a roughly equal balance of men and women.

From Cozi Website

Cozi is a free web service that helps families manage crazy schedules, track shopping and to do lists, organize household chores, stay in communication and share memories—all in one place.

People have accused us of being fanatically family focused, and you know what? They’re right. From our very beginning in 2005, we’ve been all about families. When we started Cozi, we were just a small group of Microsoft, Expedia, and Amazon veterans—all with kids of our own—looking for a way to balance our busy schedules and create more harmony at home. So we pooled our collective knowledge and experience to create something special. Something that would make it easy and fun for families to juggle everything they have to do. Not just our families, but families everywhere.

We know every family is different, but we all have one thing in common: we’re crazy-busy. Cozi is designed to make it easier to manage everything we have to do. Cozi tracks appointments and activities, simplifies shopping lists and chores, and makes it easy for everyone to communicate with each other. Even when schedules change, Cozi is there making sure all the moving pieces fit together at the end of the day.

Other Information

• Founded March 2005
• Headquarters : 506 2nd Ave, Suite 710, Seattle, WA, 98104, USA
• Key People : Robbie Cape – CEO & Co-Founder, Jan Miksovsky – Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder
• Official Website :