Comment S--L--O--W (Score 1) 71
I abandoned Orkut well before the Brazilian invasion due to hideously slow performance. Back then it was because I thought that Google had simply badly under-provisioned a "20%" project. Then I remembered another early social network, Friendster, that also collapsed due to hideously slow performance. Basically, the first social networks failed to take into account the issue of scaling to massive numbers of users... and you *need* massive numbers of users to make the site interesting and to accommodate everyone's six-degrees-of-friends. Facebook figured that out with its fuzzy updates and randomized newsfeeds that hide the fact that an individual's view of the database is almost never consistent.