TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has now started promoting their Orkut Friend import tool to their users in the US market.  This is an interesting development considering Orkut is not even popular in USA any more.

If market reports are to be believing Facebook has 92 million visitors compared to .97 million visitors for Orkut. Still, Facebook has decided to take on Orkut in the US market by promoting this tool which makes it easy for you to import your Orkut friends to Facebook. Google has not yet responded to Facebook in their attempts to take away their users.

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We have covered Opera usage in India and what’s interesting is that Orkut has consistently managed to beat Yahoo and even Gmail when it comes to top mobile sites – which essentially shows the value of social networking especially when it comes to device which is most personal to you, i.e. mobile.

In India, approximately 10 million urban Indians used their mobile phones for engaging in social networking during quarter ending August, 2009, a reach of 3.3% among urban Indian mobile phone user. Orkut maintains its market leadership role in social networking sphere, mobile version with over 3 million users, followed by Yahoo! Dating distant second with 2.1 million users, Facebook with 1.97 million users.

Demographic profile of social networking users Usage of social networking over mobile phones skews slightly towards males, with 8% more share than average user; 18 to 24 year olds are almost 50% more likely than average mobile phone user in urban India to use social networking sites over mobile phones.

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TechCrunch has just reported that Orkut’s friend list export feature seems to be down. We checked it out at our place and it is indeed not working at this very moment. One of the conspiracy theory is that Orkut has disabled it for now to prevent mass migration of their users to rival social network Facebook.

Facebook has been targeting users in India and Brazil with a special box in their profile pages suggesting them to import their existing contacts from Orkut!  It could be a bug in the service or Google might be playing games with Facebook. The two companies are no friends in the web industry.

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With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up.

But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.

This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut.

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If social networking were like a game of Risk, just about every country on the board would be heavily occupied by navy blue Facebook game pieces by now.  While already thoroughly dominating the US, the site has added support for dozens of languages, and is now the most popular social network in most of Europe, with strong growth in Asia and South America too.

But one major market where Facebook is still significantly trailing is Brazil, where Google’s Orkut remains one of the most popular sites overall in the country (#2 according to Alexa; Facebook is #25). Now, Facebook is making a move to end that run, launching a tool to help users find their Orkut() friends that are already on Facebook.

The feature is similar to the contact importer that Facebook offers US users that allow them to find Gmail(), AIM(), and Windows Live Messenger() contacts that are already on the social network. These tools make it much easier for new users to get started and build out their social graph – the nuts and bolts of Facebook.

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Orkut Zeitgeist tells us what Indians are doing online. And the word is that Indians are having fun. While sex rules a substantial portion of web traffic, surprisingly social networking in India seems to be on a higher energy level and carnal desires figure no where.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. That's how I have usually treated statistics. Before you jump I do have valid reasons. A sample size of or 2000 or 4000 or even 200000 can in no way predict or tell what over 40 million people are doing. It is almost impossible to predict trends when the market is so large. And lastly I am a firm believer that just because somebody says something it means nothing.

If it did we would still have 484 kb memory laptops (Bill Gates famous quote "484 kb memory should be enough"), Fax machines would have 10 world wide users and Computers still processing in acre big institutional lands.

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When Jamila Khan (name changed), a minor, checked her Orkut account last year, she was shocked to see that she had received a scrap (message) from another account which looked like hers and had her photograph in it.

When she clicked on the profile, she saw that there were obscene messages with her photographs posted in the profile. Khan immediately told her family and filed a complaint at the Mahim police station. After investigation, the police on Wednesday arrested Mazhar Shaikh (name changed), who is also not 18 years old yet. Shaikh and Khan used to attend the same private coaching class in Mahim.

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Here at Digit, we are all absolutely addicted to Google products. Everyone uses Gmail as their default client, Google Maps is the default mapping engine for us and let’s not even get into the realms of actual search and video-sharing. We all know who dominates there!

So it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to us when ComScore says that Google and its product constitute an amazing 28.9 per cent of the share of total time that Indians spend online. Apparently, of the total 21,799 minutes that Indians (aged over 15) spent on the Internet (at work or home) in July 2009, 6,294 of those were used on navigating Google sites.

Google accounted for 88.4 per cent of all searches conducted, and had commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2 per cent), maps with Google Maps (63.9 per cent) and multimedia with YouTube (82.8 per cent). It also commanded slightly less than half of all time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6 per cent) and email with Gmail (46.8 per cent). The one disappointment for Google would be the fact that its photo-sharing service Picasa has simply not taken off in India, with it accounting for a mere 16.2 per cent.

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The Orkut team now offers suggestions of people users may wish to be friends with on the home page. Displayed right below the birthday reminders feature, the tool puts to use an algorithm that automatically creates a list of people on Orkut that a user might know.

Besides, making it easier for users to search for new friends, the friend suggestions feature also allows them to be added to the friend list. All a user has to do is send them a short message which interestingly does not even require users to leave the home page.

On simply clicking the ‘add as friend’ link below the suggested friend’s photo, users have an option to send a customized message. Users can also take advantage of the predefined message created by Orkut and click ‘send invite’.

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There are news report that says Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh is on Facebook, while his former media advisor mentions that PM is too net ‘unsavvy’ to be on Facebook, but apparently he is. Or maybe he is not – and this could be just another fanpage created by media house (or some individual?).

Search for Manmohan Singh results in 5 pages, with one garnering 10K+followers. The point is not whether PM is on Facebook or not (how can he be on Facebook when Indian government has banned social networking and external email for diplomats) – the point here is that new entrants like Facebook/Twitter are being preferred over the popular social network, i.e. Orkut when it comes to conversation (i.e. celebrity –> mass/lesser mortals conversation).

And this is where Orkut is losing (or will lose). And no, we aren’t talking about traffic, but we are talking about super users of the systems who are probably moving away to Facebook or Twitter – infact, they are bypassing Orkut and are building connections at Facebook or Twitter.

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