Pincus Back at Tribe + Orkut Growing Like YouTube?

Mark Pincus is returning as CEO to Tribe.net. I don't know Mark personally but I have been reading his blog for about 10 months now and I really enjoy it so I'm happy that he seems to be happily back doing something that he loves. That said, I didn't really pay much attention to social networking until 2005 when I registered with LinkedIn. Tribe's zenith seemed to have occurred before I was paying any attention to it and the recent news perked my curiosity so I decided to check out Tribe's historical Alexa stats.

The Alexa stats show that Tribe's pageviews grew steadily from 2003 through 2005 but then began declining earlier this year. Hopefully Mark can reverse this trend. The slope of the growth looked impressive but it wasn't that meaningful without any other data to compare it to. Thus, I decided to see how Tribe stacked up against one of the other early social networking stars, Friendster.

In comparison to Friendster, Tribe's growth seemed less impressive. Given Frienster's recent recaptialization I was curious to see how their growth stacked against the second generation of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut.

MySpace's tremendous growth was no surprise but I couldn't believe Orkut's recent jump. Orkut is routinely sited having done little or nothing since Google's acquisition but according to Alexa's pageview stats it looks like they are really starting to take off. Also interesting to note is how benign Facebook's pageviews are. Sure their growth is fantastic but Alexa stats suggest that they have no business being mentioned in the same breath as MySpace, YouTube or even... Orkut?

(Note that I swapped YouTube in red for Friendster in the above graph) So while I appreciate that Alexa's stats are just estimates if Orkut is experiencing growth anywhere near Youtube, why isn't anyone talking about it?