According to ComScore, Orkut had 15.2 million unique visitors last April and according to the Brazilian news portal IDG Now! it lost 34% of its audience in Latin America when compared to 23.3 million visitors in April 2007. In the same period Facebook grew 976% in the region from 717,000 to 7.7 million visitors while Hi5 jumped 79% from 7.2 million to 12.3 million accesses.

I have some hints on why Orkut is no longer so attractive. I truly believe that its audience is changing. When it was launched four years ago it was about sneaking into each others lives. Brazilians immediately got addicted to it (Brazil represents 57% of all Orkut members) and we used to compete for the highest number of friends. So we added users with no criteria and it was also a place to find old mates from school and/or college and people we hadn’t seen for a long a time.

Then we started to hear stories of marriages, romances and friendships that ended because of testimonials and scraps. Suddenly we had to give explanations about the people in our network to other people going crazy about things they read on our profiles. And many of us committed “Orkuticide” (deleted the profile).

But we were a lot less Web-savvy, Facebook was still a social network for American students only, Twitter wasn’t there and most of our virtual “beloved” ones could only be reached via Orkut. So we came back only adding people we really cared about and deleting every scrap so others could no longer follow our steps. But of course it was impossible to stay connected 24 hours a day deleting messages and yet our photos were opened to everyone.

Now we can block non-friends from seeing our scraps and photos, we can turn our updates off and limit the kind of information we give. If “spying” was one of the main reasons why Orkut once was a sensation, it is not serving that purpose anymore.

Furthermore, Orkut has also been facing serious lawsuits related to pedophilia and crime and Google doesn’t seem to be able to solve the problem. People are getting afraid. They fear to give personal information or to establish contact with users they don’t know. So it is possible that they are migrating to other social networks that apparently offer “healthier” relationships.

Besides that Facebook servers to a more geek audience who no longer sees Orkut as a place to be. Is Hi5 becoming the new Orkut? Attending the ones who don’t need to be on the hype of Facebook but look for a new environment to “reincarnate” on the Web?

Anyway, Orkut is still big in Brazil. We have clients for which we do relationship with consumers there and we know how valuable it still is for corporations and how people are still active there. But there’s a lot going on out there on the Web. That means going through an adapting period and lose visitors to other social networks. Let’s see what happens.