Facebook vs Orkut. Which one of these do you have an account in? Chances are, both. Orkut was an early entrant into the Indian Social Networking Scenario. Facebook, which arrived much later, however seems to grabbed quite some attention. Though both were launched at the same time, Facebook was initially not very popular in India.

Facebook has already generated waves across the world by becoming the No. 1 Social Networking site in the USA overtaking one-time market leader, Myspace and becoming THE most popular site in Indonesia

Well, just to go over the Orkut and the Facebook battle for the grater number of users in india, Orkut still leads. Orkut leads with 13 million users, while Facebook has just 3.2 million users in India. Moreover, the traffic ranks of these social networking sites also reflect the dominance of Orkut over Facebook in India. Orkut has a traffic rank of 4 whereas Facebook has come up to the 8th spot in the overall Alexa traffic rank for India.

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Did Google owned Orkut miss a trick in India, by not partnering with more Indian companies? Inside Facebook reports, basing their findings from Facebook’s advertiser tools, that the social network saw a significant increase in the number of active users to almost 3.2 million over the last 60 days:Inside Facebook has reported a similar trend for Brazil, another country where Orkut is the dominant social network. We’ve noticed a significant increase in activity from Facebook in India over the last few months, which co-incides with the increase in the audience growth depicted in the chart. Key among them is the amount of airtime that it has received as a part of an advertisement for Aircels “Pocket Internet” service. Aircel has focused on value added services like Mobile Internet for its launches in Delhi and Mumbai, and both Facebook and Yahoo Onesearch have received TV airtime as a consequence of this. One of the famous ZooZoo’s commercials from Vodafone in India also promoted Facebook.

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One person was arrested by the Kolkata Police’s Detective Department for creating a woman’s profile with obscene photographs and putting up her mobile number on social networking site Orkut. Police said Sourav Hazra (25) was arrested on Friday following a complaint lodged by the woman’s husband.

Deputy Commissioner (DD) Jawed Shamim said the police received a complaint from a person that his wife was receiving lewd phone calls from strangers. An investigation led to the discovery of a profile on Orkut in his wife’s name, with her phone number.

Investigators found that the profile was created by Hazra on February 23. He had met the woman when they were students at Technoindia Engineering College in Salt Lake.

“We have arrested Hazra and blocked the profile,” Shamim said.

How about some virtual cutting chai? For Hyderabadis abroad, or those too busy or shy to socialise, this might prove to be manna from heaven. Started by a Chennai-boy Kaviraj, a localised networking site could become the next move in the evolution of Internet-based social netorking concepts. The website, dubbed areapal dot com claims to be distinct from other online networking sites like Orkut or Facebook, simply because “it would enable real world interactions within a locality,” said founder and entrepreneur Kaviraj.
Delving deeper into the idea behind the site, Kaviraju explained, saying: “Our preliminary studies indicated that an India-centric platform for interaction has not been executed before.

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With the advent of Web 2.0, social networking websites have become an easy target for online fraud and other identity scams. Lately, we have seen Twitter being used to phish out personal information, as well as MySpace scams and Facebook spams.

With more than 15 percent of the traffic from India, Orkut is perhaps the most popular and widely used social networking website in the country. Phishers have come up with an elegant approach to social-engineer the not so tech-savvy users on Orkut. They have updated the user profiles of several thousands of compromised Orkut accounts, which now link to various phished websites. These lure visiting users into divulging their personal information.Various phished websites claim to be the “adult” variant of Orkut. The “Orkut Sex” site has been very successful in luring several thousands of Orkut users into entering their credentials into this fake website. The attackers use the harvested details to steal other personal information for monetary gain.We have observed scores of websites being used in this phishing attack. Here are a few of them:If you have read this far, I probably don’t need to remind you to look carefully before you enter your personal details on the web. Always make sure that you are safe and protected–and keep away from the rip-offs.

Google appears to be planning to introduce “Orkut Promote”, a self service advertising platform for its social networking site Orkut, reports Digital Inspiration. The platform apparently allows users regular Orkut users to promote their content to others in the community - whether photos, videos or text content. Advertisers will be charged for ads on the service, while Orkut users won’t have to pay a fee for promotion. Google appears to have since removed the page introducing Orkut Promote, but it still does show up on search results (screencap; thanks Amit).

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The Indian army, in a circular, has advised servicemen not to post service details on Facebook and other social networking sites. In the circular, the army high command has also asked personnel to immediately remove any such information from social networking sites.

The advisory stems from fears that such data could be used by enemy spies to gain access to information like rank, unit, and place of posting. Army personnel have been warned that failure to conform to these new rules could lead to disciplinary action being taken against them.

Indian army servicemen have been advised by the Army command not to post their service details on Facebook and other social networking sites.Some social networking sites like Facebook that have gained popularity recently allow users to upload their details for online viewing by friends and relatives.

The Indian Army is the largest wing of the armed forces and is responsible for land-based military operations with its primary objectives being the defense of the nation against external aggression, maintenance peace and security within the country, patrolling the borders and conducting counter-terrorist operations.

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Imagine you are having dinner with some friends, and in walks Shahrukh Khan or someone equally famous. You get a picture clicked with him and want to share it with the world instantly. But how do you go about it since you can’t possibly wait till you get home and transfer the pictures to home PC.Google might just have a solution for you. The search giant has launched a mobile phone application for its social networking site, Orkut that allows users to update their profile pictures instantly via web by using their handsets.

So what’s new in it, you would wonder. Considering this feature is already available on other social networking site like Facebook. The company claims that the Java-based application, freely downloadable, can be accessed through any handset that supports GPRS connection. Rahul Kulkarni, product manager, Google India informs, “Photo blogging has been around for some time now, but then again it is restricted to the desktop. And among the handsets it has been restricted to the elite phones like Blackberry and Apple iPhone. We are confident that with this application will take photo sharing to another level.”

Google roots its belief on numbers. Kulkarni reveals that one in every 10 mobile web users is an Orkut user and the base is growing by leaps and bounds. “Mobile users is India have crossed the 400 million mark. Of this 15-20 million users actively use internet through their handsets. Our scraps (personalised posts written by Orkut users) from mobile phones have grown 7 times in the last month alone,” he declares .

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It was really hard to find if someone is online or not at orkut,i mean you will never know at times.Even if the person logs off,their DP will remain on top of the friends list giving us a feeling that they are still online!,Now Orkut Admins again came up with this feature like in Yahoo messenger where you can see who is online and who is not.unlike the Gtalk icon this status will be shown to everyone on your profile once you are online on orkut.

A few minutes back i was spending my time on some orkut Community Forums when a small window popped up from the bottom right of my orkut page,which showed that my one of my friend is online right now,and it also had a link to his scrapbook(See snapshot).

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