It seems that Google is experimenting with the fusion of social media (blogs, specifically) within the Orkut social networking service in an attempt to get people to come back and stay longer.

Verne Kopytoff

[from Google's Orkut puzzles experts / Internet watchers ponder reason for social network site]

The debut of several columnists on Google's social networking Web site, Orkut, has some in the Internet industry scratching their heads.

Is the popular search engine's first foray into generating content simply an anomaly or a sign of bigger things to come?

Focusing on everything from sex to politics to singer Jessica Simpson, the columns, which appeared in mid-November, mark a big departure for Google.

Until now, the Mountain View company has resolutely opposed creating content, as some rival portals do, in favor of simply connecting users to information from other Web sites.

Analysts said Google's baby step into the media business could dead end with the Orkut columns. Or the company could follow the footsteps of Yahoo and America Online, which offer online concerts and interviews with musicians, among other things.

Nate Elliott, an analyst for JupiterResearch, a technology research firm, said Google is too unpredictable for him to know.

Personally, I think that all of the social networking solutions are inadequate for my own purposes. The notion of adding blogs is not that farfetched, but I think it is backwards. What is needed is stronger social underpinnings for existing blogs.

Here, at Corante, we are interested in pursuing that line of development, and would like to see exactly the opposite of what is going on in the proprietary social networking solutions: the proliferation of dozens of non-interoperable networks that do not articulate with existing social tools, like blogs, instant messaging, or the like.

Meanwhile, "solutions" like Orkut are experiencing a wave of ennui, as initial early adopters just decide not to come back. Or at least those that the services seem to want are. This parallels the situation with Friendster that I wrote about here.

As the piece points out,

Orkut's traffic falls below the threshold of 136,000 unique monthly U.S. visitors for Nielsen/NetRatings to measure.

A recent search showed that there were slightly more than 2.88 million member profiles on Orkut, with 62.7 percent of them listing Brazil as country of residence.