Orkut 2?

Orkut with less brazillians, pakistani and indians?


Btw: The most popular app in Orkut is a farmville clone (named "Happy Harvest" or "Colheita Feliz"

What I'd like to see is Google getting behind a decent replacement for Flash. Flash is great in many ways but it has its limits, especially in the responsiveness department, and that is what holds back a lot of the kind of game experience that we see on other platforms. Web-native gaming seems stuck in a rut of simple sims, Excel rpgs and Poker etc for the moment.

I think Flash will continue to be a very viable platform. The Flash toolset is pretty frickin' amazing, and there are a ton of happy Flash developers out there, and great games galore.

I would like to see higher-fidelity 3D content on the web though. It's been a dream of many people going back to VRML days. WebGL and Native Client are two solutions to this that will be integrated into the Chrome browser. At Google I/O we talked about Unity running inside of Native Client, which combines the hardware acceleration and security of Native Client with the fantastic toolset and runtime from Unity. It's peanut butter and chocolate (well, for me). :) This is a platform I'm really excited about for 3D web games.

That's all true Mark.

But the problem is that Flash games always feel quite sucky to control. There's often something in the way that it interpolates key strokes and mouse movements that always makes Flash games seem lacking in the kind of engaging controls that really make a player want to learn to master them.

Whatever Farmville and YoVille and HoVille are, they aren't games, just glorified ads.

As I see it, Google will not come up with an alternative for Flash. They can help push the usage and development of Javascript Canvas and Unity. Already, there are a few games made purely in canvas.
The obvious advantage would be that it's native to the browser, unlike Flash.

That said, I don't really see Flash to be that limited - at least in the 2D space. Granted, the freedom of controls are under limitations, but that is because it's in the browser. A button that gives Flash complete possession for all the major input keys and the right mouse button would be enough to solve that problem.
I don't know if that would be against the browser rules though.

To be fair, in my opinion (which is very limited i'll admit) I think flash already has fair competition what with microsofts silverlight. That covers the 2d game space fairly well.

Adding in the applications like unity or torque web players adding to the 3d game space via browser and I think web based games are starting to move once more.

A lot of the problems i've seen with flash games myself, aren't so much that flash is slow, in some cases it seems damned fast. Its more a case of the developers using it aren't using it correctly.

If this is made available in a similar way as Wave, I'd be a happy man. The problem with social networks is they're most useful when everyone you know is on them. That tends to consolidate which social networks are used -- thus Facebook's popularity. I'd rather see an open social network.

Also, I look forward to the day when most new web games use open standards like HTML5 and WebGL.

@Pallav

Mostly... actually yes... I am brazillian myself, and I dislike the usual behavior (that does not mean I dislike everyone on sight, or that I have something against people in general, but the general culture is something that I disagree... of course, being brazillian myself, I have lots of friends from these places)

But that is not the reason why I commented, I commented because Orkut is dominated by those, I have some communities there, and the few ones where portuguese does not dominate completly, are the ones with a heavy presence of pakistani and indians (I wonder why I never saw a malasyan, or a fillipino, or... you get it :P)

yea personally i think a google social network would be nice to incorporate gmail and maps and so forth in one space. i wasn't blown away by wave, but i'm sure they could pull a social network together nicely.

they could do some really cool stuff. incorporating android / chrome / canvas / maps / etc / etc to help create a really seamless environment for mobile and pc usage.

the big thing is migration. it will have to REALLY blow the socks off facebook.. facebook drew people from myspace (my opinion) because it offered a simple and spam free environment. several years ago i came into the scene when both were well established and made accounts side by side..

facebook was easy to figure out even if it did take the customizing away that myspace had for those who really wanted to pip their page out. myspace gave me instant spam and i didn't like this idea that total strangers wanted to be my friend especially when it was pretty much just to advertise their services or product.

Google will have to really innovate something to draw people from what is comfortable and very functional. granted i miss the single page days or "classic" layout.

Orkut still have a interface that I think that is WAAAY superior to facebook and myspace

But it has craploads of spam... When orkut appeared, it drew lots of people, when I joined, I could find Romero, Mechner, and lots of other gamedevs on Orkut, and I was so happy :P

What happened is that suddenly the influx those 3 groups that I mentioned, brought popularity and good stuff, but also brought LOTS of spammers and people that have a complete disregard for rules (like speaking only in their native language in communities for english speakers), I saw before me all the people slowly kill their own accounts until MySpace appeared, then the exodus surged.

Currently Orkut is STILL the spammer heaven, I constantly have to click the "spam" button for all sorts of offers (usually of the pornographic type), also communities are now heavily moderated, open up a bit, and you get flooded with spam.

If Google figure a way to fix spam and improve the moderation tools (That are sorta crappy) and improve the forums (that for example have no edit button, no support for images, no easy documentation for their bb code...) then they would be able to draw people back to Orkut or to a Orkut-parallel, specially because it already feature social apps (like I said, the clones of zynga games are ridicously popular on Orkut, you see people talking about them on the streets even...)