I resent the digs at Orkut. It was a great community - if you were Brazilian or Indian. That Google chose not to run with it says more about their lack of long term social vision and parochialism than about the health of the community itself.
To be clear, it's not a "dig" at international users.
To speak from personal experience, the site that I was founder/CEO of earlier in my career, imeem, was wildly popular in the Philippines and Thailand. At peak, we were a top 20 site in the Philippines, according to Alexa.
We spent a lot of time adding country-specific filters to music charts, comments, etc once tagalog and thai started seeping into every page of the site.
We loved our foreign users, but from an advertising business perspective, a user in southeast asia is worth a small fraction of a US or UK user. The relative low value of developing country users to brand advertisers is the primary reason sites like Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, etc ended up in the place they are.
It's not a question of nationalism, it really does boil down the what the advertising market is willing to pay. This is one additional factor re:why ad-supported social platforms end up with mis-aligned incentives w/users...
I would invest the same way (focus on users in developed economies) if it were my startup - but Google isn't a startup. When you have two of the BRIC economies sewn up in a social network, AND you have cash to stay for the long game, I think you're doing your shareholders a disservice by not sticking it out.
The digs weren't so much against Orkut as about the emergence of two distinct, but conflicting, language/national cultures on Orkut, with few tools to separate them for users who weren't interested.
Curiously, I'm seeing this play out on G+ as well, which has a pretty broad international following, including a large multi-lingual contingent. There are people whose occasional English-language posts interest me, but whose non-English content is rather less compelling (you might feel similarly if I regaled you in Krell). It's part of a larger problem of poor noise controls on G+.
"We" don't need a startup visa, "the USA" might. I'd prefer that Indian entrepreneurs capitalized on the excellent opportunities available at home. I support the startup visa in the spirit of supporting choice, but I resent the implication that the whole world should send its talents to the valley.
I'd like it if India and other Asian countries had a 'start-up visa'. Currently its usually too difficult to start-up a company using business or tourist visas for most Asian countries, let alone the police registration issues for even short-term residency and the actual legal registration of a local business (which can take longer than the longest available visas), if that's pursued at all.
I have tried start-ups in several Asian countries, and have assisted friends with other attempts, so have faced these issues repeatedly.
We did begin one start-up in Singapore, though not using EntrePass, as that required paid-up capital of at least S$50,000 and actually an operating company with bank account before applying for Entrepass. Unless there is a local partner willing to set these up ahead of time, makes using this program more difficult, especially if you want to do a low-cost start-up. There is also usually the requirement of paying the founder(s) a minimum salary to qualify for the visa, so that can artificially increase the amount of paid-up capital required in advance, some of which is then lost to govt coffers. I'd prefer to not pay myself & founders a salary and use my current/chequing account to pay those expenses.
SIN was one of the easier places in general to operate. Through the use of long-term social visas and frequent travel to Malaysia (JB for an hour or a day) for monthly tourist visa. Registering a business was quite easy too.
As an entrepreneur from India, the only issue is a lot of these payment gateways, and licenses of different kinds are easier to get from US.
If those become more global I personally would prefer starting and running from India.
Ex-salesforce here, in full agreement. Who you know has a big role to play in most acquisitions, but quite important for a corp culture as unique as salesforce. In all fairness, knowing the team & culture well (and seeing a close fit), helps mitigate the risk that the acquisition won't take.
They will buy shared computers and hack on them. It's what I did growing up in India. Only, there will be a lot more of it, because these guys already have a device they know they can hack on, if they had a "computer".
"Shouldn't be too hard to build such app with existing Facebook API."
But not with the current T&C. Developers can access friends' photos, but cannot store them. Even relationships between users can only be cached for a modest period of time, not stored.
I believe profile pics have a different treatment than photos (privacy on photos is dynamic and can be revoked, while on profile pics it's public) and together with friend lists are considered part of user data.
If you're bi-lingual in a non-european language, transliterating obscure phrases from the other language could work well. For example, the poetic title திரிகூடராசப்பகவிராயர் would transliterate to thirikUdarAsappaKavirAyar. Add some subs & punctuations and I'm done - very rememberable (at least for me) :).
