TNI Bureau: It was only 5 years ago when Orkut was the primary mode of social networking with old and new friends, at-least for the Indians. It was Orkut that introduced Indians to the idea of social networking.
The terms ‘orkutting’, ‘scrapping’, ‘writing testimonials’, ‘becoming fan’ were a part of daily jargon for Indian youth. Then, suddenly someone else stole Orkut’s thunder.
Orkut’s growth and popularity did not last long, as Facebook emerged as a powerful social networking tool for millions. Facebook was created by a college student – the famous Mark Zuckerberg – for other college students, which emerged as a site that not only connects teenagers to friends, but other students, their families and even their favorite TV shows, movies, and stores.
Recently, Facebook has made separate profile pages for businesses, allowing them to create events and fan pages for their current and potential consumers. Facebook was transformed as a platform where programmers can create applications and games on it, that allow users to spend most of their time in the same platform without shifting to other websites.
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Social interactive games, like Farmville and Mafia Wars, are highly addictive and encouraging more people to utilize the social networks as a forum for gaming. There are tons of studies showing that about half the time spent on social networks are contributed by these free applications.
Orkut was never developed around third party application integration like Facebook. This is probably due to not providing social sharing plug-in and modules these applications depend on in order to function.
Facebook has continuously innovated and kept their competitors silent. Orkut, Buzz and Wave together couldn’t stop the way Facebook swept the market of social networking. Facebook not just keeps friends connected but is also exceptional in business networking.
But, still there are some cool features present in Orkut that people wish they could have in Facebook like the integration of Google chat with Orkut that enables users to contact their Gmail contacts even if they are in Orkut or the list of users who visited their profile. However, there is little doubt that Orukt has completely lost out to Facebook in the race to the top on social networking business.