Happy Birthday Orkut!
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Orkut is celebrating its 3rd birthday. I was introduced to Orkut by my wife and I really liked the ease of usage. I also liked the fact that I could find lot of my high school and undergrad friends out there in India on Orkut.
Some background on Orkut:
Orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Facebook and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-setup simple forums (called “communities”) of users. Until recently, Orkut was invitation only, but it now permits users to create accounts without an invitation.
The number of Brazilian Orkut users is just under 59% of the total users, followed by The United States and India, with about 16.5% and 12.5%. As of January 22, 2006, the number of members was over 40.42 million.
I had a believe that Orkut is picking up within the user community, if not in U.S., definitely in India. To convince myself, I did Alexa search for some leading social networking sites (MySpace, Orkut, Xanga, Hi5, Facebook) and here is a snapshot of their daily reach (as per Alexa):
(click on the image to enlarge it)
As you can see Orkut was slow in growth for most of first half of 2006 but after that it has gained momentum and is catching up with MySpace.
What I personally like about Orkut is the ability to connect to people from various countries, which MySpace lacks to a great extent.
Orkut has recently introduced a new service Orkut SMS. With Orkut’s new SMS feature, you can scrap your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. Now you can send scraps from the bus, bar or bathroom, and your friends can get notified of those scraps when on bicycle, beach or bed.
Considering the fact that SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange lots of text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores update, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS, Orkut should see substantial growth in near future in India.
TechBuzz has an article covering Orkut’s birthday and the new SMS feature.
answers.com carries a list of various kinds of social networking sites with their user count here.
Technorati Tags: orkut, alexa, hi5, myspace, facebook, xanga, social networks, birthday
Popularity: 6% [?]
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Hey, Thanks for highlighting me here on this post. My secret agents inside Airtel told me that Google Secretly contacted them and India is the next stop for Orkut SMS.
Great Blog BTW, but you need to install subscribe to comments plugin. Have fun!
[...] Original post by Technacular and software by Elliott Back [...]
[...] Orkut SMS - Orkut has just added Orkut SMS, which allows you to “scrap” your friends (ie. send notes), look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. It’s currently limited to Brazillian users on the Claro network, but global expansion is planned. Orkut also turned 3 years old recently. (via) [...]
Thilak: Thanks for letting us know on the secret :). SMS in India is so huge, Google better act on it fast. BTW, I have installed the subscribe to comments plugin.
hmm
hope these guys at http://www.indyarocks.com launch soon
[...] Orkut SMS - Orkut has just added Orkut SMS, which allows you to “scrap” your friends (ie. send notes), look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications. It’s currently limited to Brazillian users on the Claro network, but global expansion is planned. Orkut also turned 3 years old recently. (via) [...]
very goood service from orkut
keep it….
http://www.vgreets.com