Orkut's Tower of Babel moment.

George Kelly

A few hours ago, Orkut sent out e-mails to its members about a new feature letting community owners specify primary languages. The justifications -- to foster posts and searches in a single language for member ease -- make sense at first hearing. Not for nothing does Google offer language tools and searches in multiple languages. But this is an interesting moment. English-speaking Orkut members had been lobbing complaints every which way about posts in unfamiliar languages (primarily Brazilian).

Consider the site's demographics, which list the United States (31.52%) and Brazil (28.47%) nearly tied in user terms, followed by Iran (4.36%), India (3.95%), Japan (3.61%), Estonia (3.59%), United Kingdom (2.54%), Canada (2.54%), Netherlands (2.43%) and Germany (1.56%).

This could be where the world of Orkut users further splinters and Balkanizes. Understandably, the hope is that it will aid ease of communication, but the corresponding risk is that may not aid depth and breadth. Some may argue that social software isn't about depth and breadth, and that ease is the most easily quantified and worthwhile metric; to that, I would disagree. I speak one language, but I want to learn and grow fluent in more languages. I want to live in the world, not just the Anglosphere.

(Perhaps useful: Betsy Devine's "Travel broadens the...something," Susan Mernit's "Orkut: 500,000 and growing" and Blogalization's "A comunidade virtual que virou uma febre na internet")