Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management are investing $30 million in Vostu, a startup that has grown quickly in Brazil with a collection of games that have spread through Orkut, a Google-owned social networking site that’s popular in Latin America’s biggest Internet market. Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel and Facebook board member, will join Vostu’s board of directors.

Vostu has become to Brazil what Zynga, the creator of the inescapable Farmville game on Facebook, is to the U.S. market. Vostu’s biggest game is Mini Fazenda, a Farmville-like game that lets players cultivate virtual crops. The company makes money by charging people to buy virtual goods, like tractors and other items, which help their farms thrive.

“Vostu is profitable and well-capitalized and continues to grow at an extraordinary pace,” says the company’s CEO Daniel Kafie, who cofounded Vostu with two classmates from Harvard University, Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser.

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Background: Last week, Google stopped allowing Facebook to help its users find their friends by importing their Gmail contacts list. Google said the move was about data portability and liberation, calling Facebook a “data dead end” because it wasn’t giving its users’ email addresses to Google.

Facebook yesterday found a workaround to re-enable Google contacts importing, and Facebook engineering lead Mike Vernal commented on TechCrunch at length under his own name, charging Google with hypocrisy for disallowing contact importing for Orkut last year and “limiting user choice.”

What’s funny, though, as sources have pointed out to us, is that Facebook actually does allow email importing, specifically to Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail (we checked AOL mail too, but couldn’t find it there).

This is no secret; Yahoo launched its Facebook email contact importer in March of this year. In a blog post at the time, senior product manager Rick Pal said,

Importing from Facebook is super simple…After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

Update: Microsoft confirmed through a spokesperson that its Windows Live users can import both Facebook and Gmail contacts, and said some nice stuff about its commitment to customer choice.

Access to user emails isn’t something Facebook gives just anyone. In fact, only a few partners can hook into them while the rest have to rely on users’ Facebook-formatted information available through Facebook Connect. That includes Google. The difference, according to a source, is that Yahoo and Microsoft asked nicely.

Please see my disclosure related to Facebook here.

We all want to be something else, don’t we?

And so it is with Google (GOOG), the robotic, algorithmic, black-box search behemoth girding the globe with datacenters stacked up to heaven.

As it turns out, all it really wants is to be our friend.

The big question is when it is going to do that, by introducing a social strategy that actually works, even as perceived rival Facebook barrels ahead.

Sources close to the company, as well as some voluble Silicon Valley players–such as Digg’s Kevin Rose and Quora’s Adam D’Angelo–insist that Google is zeroing in on a plan for a service internally called Google Me–get it?–that it will begin to unveil in the weeks ahead.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it did so today, when Google is holding yet another product feature-fest at its San Francisco offices, as it did recently about its cool Voice Actions mobile offering.

(Memo to Google PR: Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski will be liveblogging the event, but you can’t ask press not to talk about a public company event before it takes place–even if it is invite-only.)

That’s unlikely, but some answer in the social space couldn’t come soon enough, especially because all of Google’s various and sundry efforts have yielded little in the way of any gains and, well, have shown a lot of losses.

Yesterday, for example, it was reported by The Wall Street Journal that Google’s Orkut social networking service had lost primacy in India to Facebook.

Orkut, as is well known, has lagged worldwide, except for inexplicably rocking India and Brazil.

Now, even though Google has added more punch to Orkut of late, it is down to just Brazil.

And then there was Buzz, which Google launched in February to much fanfare, followed by much more confusion.

That’s because, by using Gmail as the central organizing principle for Buzz, it quickly degenerated into an “Animal Planet” episode called “When Email Attacks.”

As for Google’s overhyped-by-bloggers communications and collaboration app Wave, it soon became “Wave Buh-Bye.”

To be fair, it is admirable that a big company like Google, which made its bones from search, has rolled out so many attempts at innovation over the last two years in areas such as apps, cloud computing and especially mobile.

And, in those categories, it is doing well, even as its stabs at social media have fallen so far off the target.

Is it because Google is inherently as social as a digital version of a telephone book, or an encyclopedia or an almanac? Which is to say helpful, but not at all attracting of friendship.

Or, as with its early efforts to find its golden business model, has Google just not yet hit on the social equivalent of AdSense and AdWords?

Meanwhile, over at Facebook HQ in nearby in Silicon Valley, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his team working all night on a multitude of feature launches, which he described to me at the recent rollout of the social networking powerhouse’s Places geo-location feature as fast and furious.

That’s probably the right tone, although if I were Facebook, I would take it down to Defcon 5 with regard to Google.

At least until Google Me is more than just a clever, rainbow-colored search term, that is.

Until then, let’s all enjoy this music video of the incomparable Lionel Richie singing the classic song “Say You, Say Me”:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

In 2004, Google launched social-networking site Orkut, which didn’t take off in the U.S. but made strides in two large overseas markets, India and Brazil.

But in July, Facebook had nearly 21 million unique visitors in India, up 179 percent from last year, according to new data from comScore Inc. Orkut saw 16 percent growth in India during the same period, to nearly 20 million unique visitors in July, comScore (SCOR) said.

The shift in India is the latest comedown for Orkut. Globally, Orkut’s growth has been stagnant, rising one percent over the past year to 55 million unique visitors in July. That compares with a 55 percent gain for Facebook, which received 571 million unique visitors in July. During the same period, rival social networking site MySpace fell 21 percent to 98 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore.

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Don’t ask Eric Schmidt. At least not in public. Someone did that at the Guardian’s tech conference yesterday, and he gave the following non-answer: “That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”

Okay, then. We’ll add that to the rather thin body of evidence that suggests that the search giant is, in fact, working on something called “Google Me.” The list so far:

• A tweet, now deleted, from Digg CEO Kevin Rose, describing a “rumor” from a “very credible source.”
• A much more confident assertion from former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, who wrote about the project on Quora, his new Q&A start-up.

And that’s it, as far as I know. On one hand, it would be easy enough for Schmidt to bat this one away if it were a complete fabrication; on the other hand, if he got into the habit of denying reports about Google (GOOG) projects under development, he’d never get anything done.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to assess Google’s chances at building a plausible social network, I think it’s fair to look at Orkut, its original attempt (big in Brazil!), and Google Buzz, its weird and unwieldy Twitter response. But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

Don’t ask Eric Schmidt. At least not in public. Someone did that at the Guardian’s tech conference yesterday, and he gave the following non-answer: “That would be a product announcement and I won’t say.”

Okay, then. We’ll add that to the rather thin body of evidence that suggests that the search giant is, in fact, working on something called “Google Me.” The list so far:

• A tweet, now deleted, from Digg CEO Kevin Rose, describing a “rumor” from a “very credible source.”
• A much more confident assertion from former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, who wrote about the project on Quora, his new Q&A start-up.

And that’s it, as far as I know. On one hand, it would be easy enough for Schmidt to bat this one away if it were a complete fabrication; on the other hand, if he got into the habit of denying reports about Google (GOOG) projects under development, he’d never get anything done.

Meanwhile, if you’re trying to assess Google’s chances at building a plausible social network, I think it’s fair to look at Orkut, its original attempt (big in Brazil!), and Google Buzz, its weird and unwieldy Twitter response. But I wouldn’t count Google Wave against them–best I can tell, that non-starter of a messaging product was truly a lab experiment conducted by a handful of engineers. If there really are a “are a large number of people” working on Google Me, as D’Angelo maintains, this could be interesting.

Where rivals like Facebook have succeeded in capitalizing on social relationships and interactions online, Google has largely failed. While “big in Brazil,” the company’s social network, Orkut, doesn’t have much traction anywhere else–it certainly can’t be considered a rival to Facebook. And after its privacy-violating launch, Buzz–Google’s latest social networking service–doesn’t appear to be much of a play in the social space, either.

No surprise, then, to learn that Google (GOOG) is looking for someone to refine its social strategy and perhaps better leverage the social network that already exists in services like Gmail. From GigaOm comes word that the company is recruiting for a new “Head of Social” position, a senior post charged with:

1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

A wise move, I think, if it’s not too late–and I don’t think it is. After all, the company has some big social assets, Gmail and YouTube, for example. It just hasn’t yet been able to leverage them with the decentralized social network that it’s clearly angling for. Perhaps, some new blood will help Google do that.

But the search giant hasn’t confined its ambitions to mere hardware and software design. It also wants to reinvent the way the mobile business works.

Heady stuff, but then, Google (GOOG) has already reinvented some industries (ask the old search engines) and is helping reorder others (ask any newspaper publisher). 

The flip side: While Google does launch lots of stuff, many of its products are now on the shelf with other dusty tech curios.

Below are a few of the choicest nuggets in our newest slideshow. Some are first-place finishers, while others had to be killed off and turned into mulch for Google’s organic garden.

In December, Facebook blocked Power.com, a site that links members’ social-networking accounts, from accessing Facebook profiles. It also sued the company, accusing it of trademark and copyright violations.

Power.com countersued Facebook in July. Its founder, Steve Vachani, has noted that sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Google’s (GOOG) Orkut enable access from Power.com and said at the time that his suit was “about users’ control of their data.” It brought on as legal counsel Scott Bursor, who fought Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Sprint (S) in early-termination-fee disputes.

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Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster.”

– Venture capitalist David L. Sze’s 2006 litmus test for entrepreneurs who claimed to have the next MySpace.

If Orkut is the Facebook of Brazil, then Friendster is the Orkut of Asia. The company, which created the social- networking market only to forfeit it to Myspace and Facebook, is apparently doing quite well in Asia. So much so, that it’s used its success on that continent to secure some new venture funding and a CEO with a Google (GOOG) pedigree. In a statement proclaiming itself the No. 1 social network in Asia this morning, Friendster named Richard Kimber, Google’s Managing Director of Sales and Operations for South East Asia, as CEO. The company also said it has raised $20 million in new venture funding from DG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures, and the Founders Fund. Friendster plans to use that money to hire up and bolster its presence across Asia, specifically Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Perhaps, we’ll see that Friendster movie yet–though I still can’t imagine a worse concept.

On my recent trip to Seattle, I visited the offices of iLike in the Capitol Hill section of that lovely Pacific Northwest city to take a video gander at one of the more interesting start ups to emerge from the social-networking arena.

The music discovery site, unlike a lot of others in its sector, has been plugging away for several years with much less funding–about $16 million from the founding Partovi twin brothers, former AOL (TWX) wunderkind Bob Pittman and a big slug from Ticketmaster (IAC)–but with a lot more impact.

Like its competitors, such as Last.fm, it has forged its popularity by focusing on linking its users with one other and musical artists via what they like to listen to.

Kind of like that old shampoo cliché: She told two friends and she told two friends and so on and so on and so on.

It’s actually quite an infectious app and also Web site, with 30 million registered users, and it’s one of the few that is useful on social-networking sites like Facebook, hi5, Orkut and Bebo.

So useful, in fact, that Facebook has selected the service as one of only two “preferred” partners, a designation Facebook announced today at its second developers conference in San Francisco.

iLike was the brainchild of Ali and Hadi Partovi, longtime Web entrepreneurs who have also worked at big companies like Microsoft (MSFT), and whose interest in music and online delivery was the inspiration for the site.

To make money, iLike has a number of businesses.

First and foremost it is essentially a lead-generator for sites like Amazon (AMZN), iTunes, Ticketmaster, and more recently, the Rhapsody subscription music service, with which it just added a somewhat restricted full-song playback offering.

And iLike has just launched an ad platform for concert promoters.

The brand itself, although focused on music right now, obviously has extension possibilities (iLike movies? iLike TV? iLike tacky theme parks?).

Most observers of iLike assume it will sell to a larger entity eventually, such as Ticketmaster, for whom the site has become a major referrer.

But the Partovis–who have sold start ups before–insist they want to build the iLike brand.

Here’s a video interview with Hadi Partovi in which we talk about all this and more, along with a tour of iLike’s offices:

Designed to help Web publishers easily add social-networking features to their sites, Friend Connect requires just a snippet of code to bring social features to a site along with a means of coordinating them with other social networks like Facebook, Plaxo and Google’s Orkut. It’s another in a recent string of data-portability efforts that hope to apply the distributed model to social networking and put an end to its so-called “walled gardens.”

“The distributed model has worked well for the Web,” David Glazer, Google director of engineering, told Outside the Lines’ Dan Farber. “That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. Now it is working to connect people to other people.”

And all of them to Google AdWords, of course. More Internet usage. More ad revenue.

Apparently, an Indian tech news site called TechGoss has its dander up about a visit Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured here) has been making to that country.

And, for information related to news of why the social-networking czar is in India, TechGoss is offering 10,000 rupees–or $240.17—specifically, 5,000 for exclusive photos of him there and 5,000 for a detailed story on his stay in India.

Currently, Facebook is the No. 3 player in India, whose social-networking scene is dominated, incredibly, by Google’s Orkut.

Asked the post: “What is Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, doing in India these days? Rumor mills are working overtime mainly pointing to a business trip to launch Facebook India soon. Others speak of a working holiday. As in the past, the Facebook PR team is only available to speak to a few chosen journalists.”

Well, Facebook PR was not helpful to me either, but that does not stop BoomTown in its greedy and ceaseless quest for rupees!

According to sources, Zuckerberg is in India and, in fact, all over the world, on a trip that is mostly for pleasure and contemplation, but also mixing it with some business.

In fact, some at Facebook are jokingly calling Zuckerberg’s month-long jaunt abroad “Vision Quest,” as the 23-year-old travels completely solo from place to place.

So in India, it is not some major initiative yet and more a getting-to-know-you visit, although Facebook will surely need to compete more handily in the growing market there.

Namasté, Mark, and safe travels!

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”

Once it’s out (and sooner than later, we are guessing), we’ll all be able to consider whether Google’s new Maka-Maka project–a way to create an open social graph over the Web that is third-party apps friendly–is a real attempted assault on the Facebook platform or more of a way to widely spread the gospel of social networking (and, thus, an assault on the Facebook platform).

In any case, it should be interesting with Facebook’s clear lead and also, well, that gigantic bag of cash from Microsoft (and more to come).

But, until then, here’s a very smart take on the rollout of Maka-Maka by Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch’s most promising addition so far, of what Google’s true aims could be:

That’s where the bigger plan for Maka-Maka comes into play. Maka-Maka is very strategic for Google. Responsibility for it goes all the way up to Jeff Huber, the VP of engineering in charge of all of Google’s apps. Huber is on record as saying that the way Google plans to compete is by using the Web as the platform instead of trying to lock developers into Google’s own platform. One way it will do that from the start is by creating two-way APIs so that any app created for Google can be taken to other Web sites. (Whether this will extend to actual user-profile data within Orkut or elsewhere inside Google remains to be seen because of privacy issues, but the apps themselves will be portable). And data from other social sites will be able to be imported into Google’s social apps as well.

“The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader. Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your search history. Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer, tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”