The wish to express ourselves, befriend, connect with others and share our interests, like never before, is making us swarm online networking sites and Facebook has emerged as the most popular site in India.

BANGALORE: Gone are the days of scrapping, sending and receiving testimonials, uploading videos, photos, and now it is writing on wall, posting images, giving status messages, poking each other, commenting on the status, updating likes and dislikes and so on.
The wish to express ourselves, befriend, connect with others and share our interests, like never before, is making us swarm online networking sites and Facebook has emerged as the most popular site in India.

Stealing millions of hearts with its attractive features, it connects people and friends in short time, runs successful social campaigns (like Meter Jam, Earth Day, Independence Day) and conducts quizzes, among many other things.

Who can forget the most engaging games like FarmVille? Which attracted millions of netizens and made us part time farmers, and for above features Facebook ought be on top.

It has indeed grabbed the number one position in India after surging past Orkut, Google’s social networking site which was number one till recently. And remember for years, the social networking tool of choice in India was Orkut, a side-project launched by a Google engineer that never caught on in North America but proved impossible to resist in India and Brazil.

A recent report from ComScore brought out flabbergast results which stated that Facebook grabbed the number one ranking in the social networking category for the first time in July with 20.9 million visitors, up 179 per cent, while Orkut registered a growth of only 16 per cent in the same time period with 19.9 million users.

“Facebook is far better than orkut. It has got so many options rather than just chatting and catching up with friends. Like you can play, poke, etc...” says, Aashika, manager in an IT firm.

Richa Prasad, an IT blogger, says, “Facebook is not only a social media/networking platform, but also helps in understanding more about a company. Companies talk about businesses, in a candid fashion. They talk about employee engagement, forums, various activities, which were not talked about before in mainstream media. One gets to meet industry people, understand their interests and network.”

Richa also adds, “It is good that I had connected my twitter and Facebook account. So even after Facebook is blocked, I can tweet updates and also make them accessible to Facebook by pretexting the tweet with #fb.”

But there are concerns too, regarding the use of such platforms. “The latest reports states that usage of social networking sites lead to loss of productivity. We have to keep in mind the investment made by our employer for infrastructure and I personally feel that, we shouldn't use it for personal work,” says Manasvi, IT professional who works for a reputed MNC in Bangalore.

The survey also declared India to be at the seventh position in the world for social networking with more than 33 million Internet users hitting the social networking sites in the month of July. The U.S., China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and UK are only ahead of India in this list.

Orkut is hardly in a position to overtake the heavily entrenched Facebook. However, Google is bringing some great ideas to the table that we can pretty safely expect to see in which social media platform they finally deliver.. Whats your say?

Posted on: 9/1/2010 at 1:07 AM
Tags: facebook, orkut, online networking sites, social campaigns, meter jam, earth day, independence day, farmville, india, brazil, twitter, u.s., china, germany, russia, brazil
Categories: News
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