Facebook’s India-style viral curve in Brazil

If history proves a guide, Facebook will soon take over from Orkut as Brazil’s dominant social network. The curves on this graph show a familiar story of what happens when Facebook’s growth curve shifts into a sharp upwards direction.

Similar curves were seen, for example, when the once-dominant Friendster died in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

In this case, I made a comparison to Orkut in India, since India and Brazil were the few major nations where Google’s social network dominated.

The data is drawn from Google Trends, an indicator of what people are searching for in given geographies. Over the last two years, Google Trends has been highly accurate and roughly three months ahead of data from comScore or other sources.

This may be because Google Trends would pick up on when people start talking about a social network before they actually sign onto it. If Brazil falls, as looks inevitable, there will be a handful of countries where rival social networks beat Facebook and all of them in Asia: Japan, Vietnam, Korea, China. (Did I miss any?)