Holy Globo, Batman

One of many highlights of the information architecture retreat in Santa Cruz, Chile this weekend was the presentations by Globo, a Brazilian media company.

My favourite was a case study on the design and development of 8P, a photo sharing site that looks like Flickr meets MySpace (but which they describe as Orkut meets Fotolog).

There were a couple of interesting ideas in the presentation: First, Flickr is unappealing to Brazilians because they want to the customize the interface to express their individual identities. (Which partly explains the success of Fotolog in Latin America.)

Second, Brazilians' love of social networking (of the MySpace-Orkut variety) goes well beyond the MySpace generation--someone told a story about how grandmothers are getting online to use Orkut. Maybe it's the high-context nature of the cultures. As Marcello (captured by Jorge) noted, Flickr is about the photos while 8P is about the people (and how they want to present their identity).

Anyway, with 180 million people and only 15% online, something really interesting is going to happen with social media and user-generated content in Brazil.

They also put together a model of 8P's user actions using my engagement/social intent axes:

That's Patricia, one of the 8P designers in the photo. Very cool.