A Web Site Born in U.S. Finds Fans in Brazil - New York Times

Just as Freindster seems to have primarily a Filipino audience so to has Orkut (Google's social network) found its legs in Brazil...

Orkut, the invention of a Turkish-born software engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten, never really caught on in the United States, where MySpace rules teenage cyberspace. But it is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.

About 11 million of Orkut's more than 15 million users are registered as living in Brazil — a remarkable figure given that studies have estimated that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home....

A Web Site Born in U.S. Finds Fans in Brazil - New York Times:

But will Orkut have the same issues of MySpace as it becomes a cultural phenomenon?

"SaferNet's president, Thiago Nunes de Oliveira, a professor of cyberlaw at the Catholic University of Salvador, said the problem had exploded in the last few months. 'In 45 days of work, we identified 5,000 people who were using the Internet, and principally Orkut, to distribute images of explicit sex with children,' he said. And that was aside from the racists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups the organization found."