• BusinessWeek, Tuesday, October 9, 2007 11:15 AM

Google shares have shot past $600, giving the Web giant a valuation of $190 billion-plus. For many critics, the question now becomes: where do we grow from here? Industry watchers have often criticized Google for failing to get into social networking, but BusinessWeek points out that they would be wrong, as Google--outside of North America and Europe--is very much in the social networking game. Orkut, as Google's social network is called, generates 24.6 million monthly uniques across the globe (nearly a quarter of MySpace's traffic)--nearly all of which come from Asia and Latin America. The latter is 12.4 million strong, and is particularly popular in Brazil, while China and Japan drive Orkut's 11 million monthly uniques in the Asia-Pacific region. North America and Europe's totals are a mere 600,000 and 1.2 million, respectively.

This may be just fine for Google, as long as Orkut continues to grow in its core markets--where Friendster, incidentally, is its main competitor. Like Facebook, Google's growth strategy for Orkut is to open its platform up to third-party developers, but according to the BusinessWeek report, the search giant plans to take the openness idea a step further. Because Google has so many Web services, Orkut developers can easily develop cross-platform programs, such as an application plotting the location of their friends on Google Earth. Unlike Facebook, Orkut programs don't have to be hosted on Google's servers--giving developers full ownership of their programs, plus the ability to deploy their software on third-party sites--like Facebook.

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