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Friday, March 17, 2006

Joga, a Google/ Nike Community

In time for the world cup, Joga.com is a collaboration between Nike and Google to create an online community for soccer fans. “Joga bonito” means “play beautiful” in Portuguese, the site says. The domain Joga.com is registered to Google.

Joga is invite-only at the moment, and without being logged in all you can see is a tiny video. Trying to log-in with your existing Google account only brings up a “sorry” message, but you can add yourself to the invite queue by providing your email at the bottom of Joga.com. Nice way for Nike to market this as something exclusive and grab a lot of email addresses.

So, did the Googlers program something from scratch for Nike? Doesn’t seem so. The log-in box provided on Joga.com shows “service=orkut” in the URL (Orkut is the older Google-powered community). And, as Manoj Nahar found out, what’s probably even more revealing is the following screen (to see this, go to the Joga privacy policy, scroll down to “your choices” and click the first link):

But hey, that’s still better than what Joga.com looked like in 2000...

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