We all know that Facebook has already surpassed Orkut as the most visited social network website in India where Orkut used to be the most visited social network once! The war is still not over and Facebook now wants to leap frog Orkut. Well, not that Orkut kept quiet, they too have taken counter steps to check facebook’s growth but have not made much of a difference.

And now Google is trying yet another strategy to give a jump to Orkut’s usage graph by launching a cool orkut extension for Google Chrome Browser (Download).

This Orkut extension puts an orkut icon next to Google Chrome browser’s address bar which shows the number of new updates from your friends on Orkut (something Facebook already has had for long). On clicking the icon, you can see a drop-down menu with links to your friends’ profiles and other Orkut links. Some other features of this extension are:

    * a “Share this page” link to help you share interesting content with your friends on orkut.

    * a universal search box that lets you search for content on orkut

    * Notification pop-ups with new updates on photos, scraps, videos, status messages and applications from your friends.

But now the big question is will this new extension be able to win over all users of Orkut who have switched to Facebook? All the features that the extension provides are already available on Facebook. If Orkut wants a a major overhaul and a fix to it’s current state, it has to introduce new and innovative features which help users in some way or the other. Just implementing some features from Social Networks that already exist wont help Orkut’s growth at all.