Serving Global Markets

Why Orkut is hugely popular in India compared to MySpace and Facebook which are popular in US? money.cnn.com has an interesting comment on the same that came from Nayak an young entrepreneur:

I asked him why he thinks Orkut is so much more popular in India than in the U.S. His answer suggested it might have something to do with Google's renowned technical capabilities. He points out that many of his friends get online at access speeds as slow as 15 kilobits per second. (About what AOL members in the U.S. were at in 1990.) His own dialup line is an only slightly-less-pokey 28K.
Nayak says "Orkut is much lighter than Facebook," meaning it is better designed to be used on a slow dialup line. While getting onto Orkut takes about a minute and a half for him, Facebook takes a minute longer. And getting on MySpace takes him five minutes.
Reference: CNN Money


In short be mindful of amount of data you are sending over the wire in web applications if you need to serve global markets.