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Something I didn't make clear in our Orkut coverage, based on comments: Google's SocialStream was originally conceived as a way to improve Orkut, and the new Orkut design, which looks a lot like the SocialStream mockups, increases the probability that SocialStream's features will just be added to Orkut and not launched separately. From the SocialStream project plan:
Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project's scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty.
It's still possible that SocialStream may be rolled out separately to distance it from Orkut's Brazilian and Indian user base - the point would clearly be to get traction in the US market. And yet that would also mean a doubling of the workload: Orkut already has all the social networking basics, plus integration with many of Google's services (Google Talk, for instance).
And if SocialStream did take off, they'd end up with another Google Video vs YouTube puzzler: how to maintain or merge the brands without overlap. So the most obvious thing to do is use Orkut to "pull a Facebook": build the hype in the geek community and cater to both the original audience and the tech elite. It wouldn't be too hard: almost all early adopters are on Gmail, all use Google search (obviously) and many use other Google services too.
I could be wrong. Perhaps even Google doesn't know where the SocialStream features will pop up. But either way I expect Orkut will become the testbed for Google's social networking experiments. Thanks to Adam P for calling me out on this one in the comments.
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