So who's on Orkut nowadays?

Some of you may be familiar with Orkut, the popular social networking / community site. Unlike its direct competitor Friendster, people can join only by invitation at the moment, which results in some interesting demographic trends.

Since I was bored a little while earlier, not to mention rather curious as to who's on Orkut right at this moment, I took a simple tally of the first 200 unfiltered search results. I specified no additional search criteria; instead, I simply logged the country of the person's origin.

* Other countries less than 2% included, in no particular order: Romania, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, Ethiopia, Australia, China, Switzerland, Spain, Russia, Lithuania, Norway, Mexico, Luxembourg, Germany, Portugal, Iraq and Thailand. This extraordinarily unscientific study was conducted on Sept. 12, 2004.

Interestingly, three-fifths of the group comes from Iran and Brazil. Which begs the question: given their large respective representations, are Iranians and Brazilians actually joining the same communities? That is, are Iranians actively engaged in conversations about Carnival and bossa nova? Likewise, are Brazilians talking about the Achaemenid Empire and Hedieh Tehrani?

Which seems to call for a Venn diagram of Common Interests Between Iran and Brazil:

Ah yes: Pele, the great equalizer.