So, where's the actual profit? Or is this all mind control, friend-of-a-friend illuminati stuff that's assumed to make Google want to do this stuff?
Argue the points, or don't bother addressing the writeup. Good grief.
The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap.
Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time.
That's what I felt was happening as an outsider.
That's doubly false :)
First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups.
Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.
Myspace, Friendster, Bebo…
They cut Orkut because Brazilians aren't worth much in advertising. Plain and simple.
Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.