Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

dafacto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#21

Post by makalumhenders »

soneca wrote: post #11
soneca wrote: post #8

Yes, the Gizmodo article is hilarious!! I saw it shared on my Facebook timeline a lot! For Gizmodo it is an absolute win - lots of sharing. For Rego, I am sure it is a short-term win. But at the long-term there are a lot of challenges to make the transition from novelty to consolidate, real value delivering app. My 2 cents would be, keep the branding as a purpousely funny. Rego is a funny bad word, but not one that a…

Just more 2 cents on this boring Saturday morning. If you launch it in portuguse and/or for Android, you should a great launch paying a tweet or post at https://twitter.com/kibeloco (they are very big here, and they are the funniest site by far). Another huge player on funny content is http://www.youtube.com/user/portadosfundos . Just some tips if you decided to invest in this branding

Thanks for the tips, soneca

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#22

Post by icebraining »

alenart wrote: post #16

The video is currently not loading for me, so the below is just an observation on the linguistics of these situations not a troll to downgrade the humor contained herein. This isn't the first time a brand has had to rethink its name to adjust to the local language. The Ford Pinto was re-dubbed when it entered Brazil because pinto in Portuguese is a word reserved for the male anatomy. It also happens the other way: th…

I'd just like to point out that pinto only refers to the male anatomy in Brazil. Here in Portugal - and probably in other Portuguese speaking countries -, a "pinto" is just a young chicken.

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#23

Post by gdsimoes »

speeder wrote: post #13
zdw wrote: post #7

So what is Orkut slang for in Portuguese?

Google handling of Orkut just suck. Personally the features on Orkut are much more interesting than the ones in Facebook, but Google never fixed issues that existed since the platform inception ( for example there are no edit button to fix your forum posts )

I never understood why Google didn't pay any attention to Orkut. It could be much better than facebook.

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#24

Post by RDeckard »

objclxt wrote: post #2

Since the article text itself doesn't mention exactly why the name is so bad - Rego, the name of the product, is slang for ass crack in Portuguese. I can sort of understand why you wouldn't want to put that in the post itself, but it's also a little annoying to have to watch a video to find out why it went viral.

Thanks. Didn't bother watching the video either and was slightly annoyed they never mentioned in the text. (Again, sensationalist title, and probably a cheesy video. But maybe I just woke up with a bad mood :))

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#25

Post by objclxt »

richardv wrote: post #4
objclxt wrote: post #2

Since the article text itself doesn't mention exactly why the name is so bad - Rego, the name of the product, is slang for ass crack in Portuguese. I can sort of understand why you wouldn't want to put that in the post itself, but it's also a little annoying to have to watch a video to find out why it went viral.

I enjoyed watching the video since if I had read your comment, it would have spoiled the entire reason why this post is pretty hilarious..... Finding out the context of a "joke" before the joke being told is kind of a spoiler. Anyway, watch the video if you can, it's worth the minute.

I do get that, but lots of people either don't want to watch a video or can't, for various reasons.

I hope this wasn't a problem for too many people, because (tongue in cheek here) I'm positive everyone reads the articles first before coming to read the comments.

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#26

Post by olh »

soneca wrote: post #11
soneca wrote: post #8

Yes, the Gizmodo article is hilarious!! I saw it shared on my Facebook timeline a lot! For Gizmodo it is an absolute win - lots of sharing. For Rego, I am sure it is a short-term win. But at the long-term there are a lot of challenges to make the transition from novelty to consolidate, real value delivering app. My 2 cents would be, keep the branding as a purpousely funny. Rego is a funny bad word, but not one that a…

Just more 2 cents on this boring Saturday morning. If you launch it in portuguse and/or for Android, you should a great launch paying a tweet or post at https://twitter.com/kibeloco (they are very big here, and they are the funniest site by far). Another huge player on funny content is http://www.youtube.com/user/portadosfundos . Just some tips if you decided to invest in this branding

Do not go with kibeloco. They are known for stealing content. There is even a verb invented to describe stealing online content thanks to them: "kibar".

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#28

Post by rachelbythebay »

soneca wrote: post #10
zdw wrote: post #7

So what is Orkut slang for in Portuguese?

None. It is a completely strange word for us, our words normally doesn't end with a consonant (never with a 't') and we don't even use 'k' in our alphabet. I guess not even Google knows why it went so viral here. A proof of that is that now Facebook is by far the most used social network here (Google didn't even try to make Orkut -> GooglePlus transition, I don't know why).

Thanks for the language tip! I always wondered if there was some kind of local connection which made it work and was completely opaque to everyone back in Mountain View. It seems nobody knows, or if they know, they aren't telling.

Orkut was great stuff. Every time they went down, I'd get paged (if on call that week) because every single person in Brazil would go back to the login page and start submitting the form over, and over, and over...

I wasn't on-call for Orkut, but rather something else it depended on. All of that login load translated through to us. It got to the point where we'd interpret a load spike as "let's check Orkut" and when it got to "yep, it's down", we'd just ignore it.

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#29

Post by makalumhenders »

rafski wrote: post #18

As someone who never understood the appeal of foursquare/gowalla kind of apps, I do like this one — saving locations just for myself and sharing only if I really want to. Well done using media attention for your benefit, you're handling the "controversy" well. Selling apps is a tough game and every user counts, good luck out there.

Thanks rafski, yep that was exactly why we created the app -- the appeal of something Gowalla-like, but without the social part.

Re: Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

#30

Post by Evbn »

soneca wrote: post #10
zdw wrote: post #7

So what is Orkut slang for in Portuguese?

None. It is a completely strange word for us, our words normally doesn't end with a consonant (never with a 't') and we don't even use 'k' in our alphabet. I guess not even Google knows why it went so viral here. A proof of that is that now Facebook is by far the most used social network here (Google didn't even try to make Orkut -> GooglePlus transition, I don't know why).

Orkut was something like 5 years old before G+ was built. It has such a different social/sharing/privacy model, so it would be hard to convert, and it is only a major player in one country.
Post reply on HN