March 18, 2006
Google and Nike’s Community game!! Joga.com (Exclusive Screenshots)
Send me a mail info at seocase.net to get invite
Google and Nike have launched a community site http://www.joga.com. When I first saw this site with the google login, the first thing that came to mind was google’s social networking site orkut.com. Below are few exclusive screen shots of this site and much more.
This is a home page of Nike’s new commnity site powere by google. It takes google account as login.
When I tried logging in with my account it came up with this page saying that its an invite only site.
I could already smell there is something more here. A look at the code already tells me its orkut. I started reading the privacy policy. Clicking on one of the links take me to next page.
I can see confirmed evidence of orkut, naked orkut help pages hanging out of joga.com. Once again google is less than ready and the service is out in open. Though its not mentioned on any of their blogs.
Determined to find all the meat on this story. I did whois for the domain. The domain is registerd by google. Whois revealed that the domain was first registered in April 1999, which means google is using a recycled domain.
I turned to archive.org to see domain’s past. This is how joga.com used to look in 1999. 
Still there is not much detail about what the service is and what all it contains. I had to turn to rival search engine yahoo for help and I somehow managed to sneak into joga.com support pages. Below are Exclusive sreenshots of joga.com help pages and some description.
The page above explains how you can create your own community. It says you cannot create official or athelete community as they would be created by players. You can invite your friends to join the commuity.
Google has not really done their homework? Nah!! Its already available in 14 languages most of which are football playing nation’s languages. Its available in Chinese and Thai as well.
So what else you can do on jogacom. Well you can blog.
You can create your own team called starting 11 by the site. Yes this feature would have Ajax bells and whistels as gmail, google reader, google maps and google homepage. As you can drag and drop pictures of players in the position you choose for them.
What else you can do here? Upload videos. It says videos uploaded here would also be available on google video. Don’t they know how to mashup google’s community of applications to nikes’s community? Very well indeed.
Infact video on joga.com’s home page are hosted on google video and is played using google video player. Video playing on joga.com are already available in search on google video.
Now does google need to answer the question how would it monitize orkut?Disclaimer : I don’t have any invites to the joga.com. I don’t know anyone who works in Google or is part of Google Trusted Tester Program. Keep watching this blog for impact anaylsis of this and other stories as they unfold.
You can see all the images in full size here
Send me a mail info at seocase.net to get invite
Yeah, I really would like to join this, but I don’t know how I am going to possibly get an invite. I’ll tell you what. If I ever am able to join somehow, I’ll invite you if you do the same for me, alright?
Anyone can visit the support pages:
http://help.joga.com/support/
hmm.. very interesting read..
A nice post, specially how you tracked the history. I hope google will be able to crack the social networking with Joga by catching on to MySpace for soccer kind of site. Otherwise Orkut has not done much or mentionable in social networking - but I dont like this invitation only stuff
Santosh
http://www.newsmotto.com
Hello there,
Do you have invites now? if you have, can you give me or tell me where I can get one? thanks in advance, my email is fanweixiao(#)163.com
Regards
Just a note to the original author, you can login into joga with your google account (dont forget retaining the @gmail.com in the end). & guess what…all of your personal info from ur orkut profile is already filled in for the joga profile pages.
In fact, in my case it was even showing me one of the unapproved testimonials from orkut there. So orkut is after all an informal yet quite effective data gathering tool for google. No doubt, google has virtually copied the controversial Microsoft Tos into orkut’s ToS
Happy Jogging
[...] Joga.com also offers blogs! Here’s a nice rundown of the system with screenshots via SEOCase.net. With some much blogging and content going on at Joga.com, one has to assume that Google & Nike would be opening the gates to their walled garden after some time - in an effort to share the world’s information of course. [...]
[...] Enlace | Screenshots de Joga [...]
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[...] Your page is now on StumbleUpon! For each appearance in your referral logs, one of our members has ’stumbled upon’ your site after clicking “Stumble!” on our toolbar to discover a new great site. Enter Your URL → [...]
[...] Hace unos días se anunció [Dirson, Newsweek] una colaboración un tanto peculiar entre Google y Nike, creando una red social para los amantes del futbol, Joga.com [algunos screenshots], que complementa una campaña que Nike lleva haciendo en los últimos meses, con la mente puesta en el mundial de este año. [...]
[...] http://search-engine-blog.seocase.net/2006/03/18/… [...]