So far in
Read/WriteWeb's Top International Web Apps series, we've covered countries in Europe (Germany, Holland, Poland, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Italy) and Asia (Korea, China). We may
have some issues covering certain other regions, as worldwide Internet penetration is
still very low - 16% at
last count. That's a concern too for the subject of today's post, Brazil. It has a
national Internet penetration rate of just 14.1%. Even so, it is the 10th biggest country
in the world in terms of Internet usage - due to its large population of 186 million. And
Brazil Internet users are very community-minded and social, as we'll see in this
post.
My thanks to Fabio Seixas, who provided me with the details about Brazil's Web market.
Fabio told me that Brazil's web industry is an important one - he said they have many areas with low economic activity, but in the medium-to-big cities there is high Internet usage. In the late 90's, the Brazilian web industry was dominated by a few large web portals. But now he is seeing a growing number of independent initiatives.
An important point is that the 14% of Brazilians who can connect to the Internet, connect to it a lot! Recently Netratings reported that web users in Brazil connected for an average of 19 hours and 24 minutes per month. Japan was in second place with 18 hours and 7 minutes of connection time per month, followed by France. This behavior perhaps shows the potential of the Brazilian web industry.
A number of new 'web 2.0' sites started up in Brazil last year. But like many other countries, Brazil has a lot of web app clones.
Here are some of the popular web apps in Brazil:
Videolog.tv is a YouTube clone, which is very successful within the teenage demographic.
Gazzag is a friends community network. It was launched with all the hype that Orkut created in Brazil. Around 70% of Orkut users are brazilians. Fabio says Gazzag did a great job creating a brazilian version of Orkut, but it didn't attract as many users as Orkut.
Flogão is a photo community based site, just like fotolog.net. Another big player is Vibeflog, a photo community site for teenagers.
Camiseteria: This is Fabio's site and he says it is "probably the first web 2.0 project in Brazil, which launched in August 2005." Camiseteria is a tee-shirt store and community with some long tail and co-creation (DIY) concepts.
BlogBlogs is a blog directory and community tool, which has some aspects of Technorati. In BlogBlogs you can create a list of favorites and your online activities. It also has a ranking of brazilian blogs.
Wasabi: An RSS aggregation tool mixed with a community. You can set up your network of friends and aggregate their feeds from blogs, flickr, podcasts and many others. It's invite only currently - if you go to the homepage you'll just see a username/password screen, with the message: "To enter Wasabi you`ll need an invitation from someone who`s already in."
Overmundo is a collaborative blog about the brazilian culture. This project is backed by the brazilian government.
Linkk, Ouvi Dizer, Eu Curti: All of these sites are Digg clones. But in Brazil none of them have archived much success. Fabio thinks that brazilian users are very community focused and none of the above sites have used community features in a good way.
Aprex is an online office suite with calendar, contact list, tasks, virtual drive, notebook, blog and polls. This project was launched last month.
Blogger.com.br is a free blog hosting tool, just like blogger.com, controlled by one of the big Internet players in Brazil - Globo.com.
BarCamp is probably the only event with web 2.0 content in Brazil. Fabio says: "We lack some cutting edge events here, but we do have many web conferences."
Community plays a big part in a lot of the apps mentioned above. Fabio says that brazilian users have a special affinity for community:
"The Orkut effect was much bigger and faster here than the MySpace effect in the US - but not of quite the same proportions of course. Also our blogosphere is growing very fast, just like the rest of the world."
If there are other Brazilian apps you're aware of, please add them to the comments. Thank you Fabio for all the great information in this post!
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Top Web Apps in Brazil.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2750
Acompanho o Read/WriteWeb h· uns 2 anos e de l· tirei conceitos interessantes sobre o que ele chamada de Web como Plataforma...ou, mais popularmente, a Web 2.0. Mas como tudo o que nos cerca È um cÌrculo infinito de voltas... Read More
Read/Write Web lista as 10 melhores webs 2.0 do Brasil. Read More
Next in our series on international Web markets is France. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy and Brazil. France has the 9th highest number of Internet users in... Read More
Next in our series on international Web markets is France. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy and Brazil. France has the 9th highest number of Internet users in... Read More
Next in our series on international Web markets is Japan. The information for this post was provided by Benjamin Joffe (CEO of Plus Eight Star Ltd) and Masashi Kobayashi (partner of Globis Capital Partners - one of the largest Venture... Read More
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. With all this buzz around the potential Yahoo! acqusition of Facebook for $1Billion, we think it's time to do the social networking faceoff. Arguably of all services in the new social... Read More
I've been hearing whispers that Google will integrate their social network Orkut with the mobile social networking app they acquired last year, Dodgeball. While it's not rocket science to make the connection between the two products (both are social... Read More
Co-written with Neeraj Kumar of India Upcoming It's an exciting time for the economy in India, which is also reflected in its Web market. India has 1.1 Billion people and the average age of the nation is just 24.9 years.... Read More
Written by Sebastian Moser from Austria and edited by Richard MacManus With 4.6 million internet users (a penetration rate of 56.8%) and a broadband penetration rate of 61.8%, Austria is a little bit above the average for the European Union... Read More
Para quem perdeu a notícia quando estava fresca - Richard MacManus publicou mês passado uma lista de aplicações Web no Brasil. Tudo bem, top 10 no conceito do autor. Mas a lista é interessante, e pode ser consultada diretamente lá, no seu blog, ... Read More
Written by Bjorn Fant and edited by Richard MacManus Sweden is a nation determined to be an international competitor in the IT arena. IT budgets in the private and public sector add up to 5% of Sweden's total National Growth... Read More
Written by Vishal Sharma and edited by Richard MacManus Richard's intro: Australia is a country of 20.75 million people, 14,663,622 of whom are Internet users according to a Nielsen//NR report from August 2006. That gives Australia an Internet penetrat... Read More
In the latest in Read/WriteWeb's coverage of international Web markets, we explore Hungary - a central European country of 10 million people. The information in this post was supplied by Hírbehozó, a professional journalist for online med... Read More
Written by Dejan Bizinger, a web manager at Serbian media company B92.net, and edited by Richard MacManus Serbia is a country located in Southeast Europe with around 9 million people. Around 1.5 million Serbians use the Internet and the majority... Read More
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
Wait.. Blogger.com.tr looks just like the early days of Blogger.com and the logo is the same.. Is this a venture of Google or a violation of copyrights??
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | September 11, 2006 5:09 AMSorry, blogger.com.br... see http://web.archive.org/web/20010301212759/http://www.blogger.com/
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | September 11, 2006 5:12 AMThanks for this write-up. As a person who has a need to keep an eye on L.America and Brazil in particular, this is a great list of sites to follow up.
Posted by: soxiam | September 11, 2006 6:07 AMHello, Emre Sokullu!
I am brazilian and I can tell you that the Blogger.com.br is a legal product. In fact Ev himself came to Brazil when the product launched yoears ago.
About the list, preety neat! Nice job.
Dispite the "let´s-inflate-my-ego" moment when someone tells the world that they´re the first doing something when it´s kind of hard to tell it exactly, the list is very nice.
Congratulations!
Cheers from Brazil.
Posted by: [caiocesar] | September 11, 2006 6:22 AM[caiocesar]
Just to update my previuos comment...
Here is the URL for the blog entry from Bernardo Carvalho´s blog (he is a former Globo.com employee. Kind of the responsible for the Blogger.com.br project) where he tells the world (in portuguese) how was the Blogger.com.br negotiation and launch.
The URL is: http://rawsocket.org/rtfm/arquivos/2002_08_01_arquivo.html#85365148
Posted by: [caiocesar] | September 11, 2006 6:27 AMHi Caio, I mean probably.. just probably... :)
Posted by: Fabio Seixas | September 11, 2006 7:54 AMNice write-up.
Fabio,
I have been living in Brasil for a bit while I work on a project..in Sao Paulo. What city are you located. Nice site btw. It doesnt seem like anything is nearly as popular in Brasil as Orkut. I think everyone between the age of 13 and 30 has an Orkut profile here.
Abraço
Posted by: Eric Willis | September 11, 2006 8:56 AMI´m a brazilian interface designer happy to see my place 'in the map' here!
I´ll be also happy to help with information about us. :)
Posted by: Paty | September 11, 2006 10:18 AMHi Eric. I´m in Rio. You can find me at http://blog.fabioseixas.com.br
Posted by: Fabio Seixas | September 11, 2006 10:24 AMI really like the visuals of these sites. Looks clear, properly spaced out, and colorful. Brazilian've done a good job! I think there must be much more out there, but I dont speak spanish (is it spanish?）
Posted by: terry xu | September 11, 2006 11:03 AMYou forgot to mention TempInbox.com
Posted by: E. David Zotter | September 11, 2006 11:55 AMhttp://www.tempinbox.com/
Terry, it´s portuguese here, not spanish.
Posted by: Paty | September 11, 2006 12:32 PMVideolog rulez... :D
Posted by: Bruno Dulcetti | September 11, 2006 12:35 PMhttp://www.videolog.tv/blog/
http://www.brunodulcetti.com/blog/
A YouTube clone, a Fotolog clone, a lot of Digg clones, a Technorati clone, an Orkut clone... we do not have much original apps here in Brazil, unfortunately.
Posted by: Walmar Andrade | September 11, 2006 5:31 PMThere´s also: www.elefante.com.br that´s a good service! www.admarket.com.br (like Adsense)
and also please visite my webblog about gadgets: www.antenando.com.br/tecnologia
thx ;-D
Posted by: Rael B. Riolino | September 12, 2006 5:11 AMHi guys, I'm Manoel Lemos from BlogBlogs. Thanks for the reference. I'm preparing big changes and new features on BlogBlogs for the next weeks. Keep in touch.
Posted by: Manoel Lemos | September 12, 2006 9:25 AMmaybe you'd like to check out co-link:
http://www.co-link.org
it's a tool for the creation of multi-directional links by communities. co-link was developed in the federal university of rio grande do sul (UFRGS), but so far has not achieved much sucess.
actually, it's being (slowly) re-developed to add community applications.
Posted by: träsel | September 12, 2006 5:14 PMWhere is Syxt.com.br ?
Why isnt it here ??
Shame on You!!
Posted by: Marcos | September 12, 2006 6:37 PMOrkut is not on the list? Surprising!
Posted by: Phoenix | September 13, 2006 1:17 AMOrkut is not actually a Brazilian app, it was made by a Turkish guy from Google. But Brazilians make up 70% of the user base, according to Fabio.
Marcos, care to tell us what Syxt.com.br is and why it should be on the list? That would be a lot more helpful...
Posted by: Richard MacManus | September 13, 2006 2:13 AMSyxt.com.br is great too!
it´s my favorite "brazilian digg"
Posted by: Rael B. Riolino | September 13, 2006 5:02 AMGreat list! I was doing one list myself after reading R/W's international web apps series and came out with mostly the same ones.
Regarding orkut, as already mentioned, it's an American webapp, so it shouldn't be listed. It would be part only if the list was about all popular webapps. In this case, we would have to separate in 3 categories: a) internacional (with or without brazilian version); b) portal functionality (UOLK, Terra Gaia and the recent Terra Sonora) and c) independent.
Fabio's list just missed the following:
Posted by: IN Hsieh | September 13, 2006 6:28 AM. Mlive.com.br: business community and networking
. NaViagem.com.br: travel destinations and experiences
. Syxt.com.br: business community and networking (commented above, but not a digg clone as mentioned)
. TalkAndWrite.com.br: skype collaboration tool (app, but not web-based)
. old-school webapps - on the user and not technology point-of-view: ivox.com.br (product/service/company reviews); beltrano.com.br (social networking) and parperfeito.com.br (dating, sold to europeans).
that´s a great lesson for those one who think that brazil is way behind other countries in terms of technology.
Posted by: carioca | September 13, 2006 11:55 AMInteresting, no social bookmarking sites? Over on Simpy I noticed the recent rise in 'pt' (Portuguese) visitors. Must be Brasilians! They are ahead of 'zh' visitors currently.
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic | September 13, 2006 11:57 PMNice to see some Brazillian web apps. Though I'm from Brazil, I did not know almost any of these!
And, in fact, Orkut is everywhere these days. Some months ago, during a criminal outbreak in S√£o Paulo (a Brazillian city), the police commander urged citzens to stop spreading hoaxes and paranoia through Orkut. Live on TV!
Posted by: Paulo Salem | September 14, 2006 4:53 AMWhile some sites are based on the same concept, we can't say that are all clones.
Google video is not a clone of youtube for example.
If we begin talking about clones, google,msn,yahoo... they all clone each other applications like messengers,shoppings and all kind of services.
In the end, the best service or application get more users no matter who had the idea.
Also, some websites clone features or ideas from the brazilian sites too.
What i'm trying to say is that there's no evils or angels, even with some websites trying to act like angels...
Posted by: Flog√£o! | September 14, 2006 7:50 PMHello All,
Actually, top web app in Brazil is MSN messenger. That makes MSN the top destination in the country, together with Google+Orkut.
And by the way, "pt" is not brazilian visitors, but portuguese. Brazil is "br".
Posted by: marcelo Sant'Iago | September 15, 2006 12:26 PMi m from india. i love brazilian too much for ther dance, music, and they r much enjoing then rest world.......but take care from AIDS.....YOUR"S
Posted by: vivek | November 10, 2006 2:38 AMi m from india. i love brazilian too much for ther dance, music, and they r much enjoing then rest world.......but take care from AIDS.....YOUR"S
Posted by: vivek | November 10, 2006 2:39 AMHi guys, I would to indicate a big brazilian dating site (namoro)
Namoro Meu Desejo
http://www.meudesejo.com.br
Thanks :)
Posted by: Daves Balthazar | November 11, 2006 1:43 PMThat is a list of brazilian web 2.0 sites.
Look at: http://lista2.0br.com.br
My best regards,
Posted by: Paulo Rodrigo Teixeira | January 4, 2007 2:20 AMRichard allow me to correct you www.ouvidizer.com is Portuguese (Portugal) not Brazilian.
Brazil has a great potential for web 2.0 apps, you should do a "Top Web Apps in Portugal" and start with our project, Origo (www.origo.pt) ;)
Thank you
Posted by: Alexandre Vidal | January 7, 2007 8:00 AMHi, there is a new and much better version of the BlogBlogs available. Take a look...
Posted by: Manoel Lemos | March 22, 2007 8:30 PMIm originaly from Brasil and live in Florida
Posted by: Fernando Cabral | June 2, 2007 7:13 PMand am checking things out over here
Really Brasil is developed in computing
Posted by: el-broder | June 22, 2007 8:49 PM