I had my orkut account many years back and I had not heard much about facebook till one year back. One of the reason for my ignorance was I was living in Asia where facebook is not so popular as orkut is. But when I see overall numbers for the people using either of these services, facebook is clear winner. Both of these quite popular social networking website. Facebook has recently become very popular in the North America and UK.
Orkut could not become as successful as facebook become despite the fact that orkut has support from powerful company like Google. One of the reason, I find for this failure is the cultural factor in two website. Orkut never tried to hide information of users from other users (by default) while facebook does so. Facebook tried to engage the people through its applications like Zombie etc where people were attacking each other and coming again and again to check who has attacked them. It was really social networking site. There were also features like updates from the friends where people could see what was happening with other people. This concepts was new, I think another social networking site linkedin uses this for a long time but orkut failed to recognised that it was becoming more individualistic website. People are already enough isolated, they don’t talk to each other very often but they are still curious to know what is happening in other people's life.
When people are becoming part of some group or network they would like to see the updates in their inbox (or on the screen when they open the website) and not to go to other people's scrapbook to see what is happening there. In fact orkut scrapbook is so bad that one can go to other people's scrapbook and by reading some of the history of scraps and answers knows what is going on there. one can know this thing in facebook too but only for friends.
Orkut could not recognised how to earn revenue out of this website while facebook has done it very cleverly. I am not sure how much revenue facebook is making but the way they placed ad in between of the conversations etc is quite good for the advertisers and facebook can earn high click per view.
Study of these two sites makes very clear about the cultural changes in the society in 21st century. If Google wants to make any profit out of orkut they should try to understand the society around them. They need to think out of the box in this domain because it different domain from their search engine market.
Orkut could not become as successful as facebook become despite the fact that orkut has support from powerful company like Google. One of the reason, I find for this failure is the cultural factor in two website. Orkut never tried to hide information of users from other users (by default) while facebook does so. Facebook tried to engage the people through its applications like Zombie etc where people were attacking each other and coming again and again to check who has attacked them. It was really social networking site. There were also features like updates from the friends where people could see what was happening with other people. This concepts was new, I think another social networking site linkedin uses this for a long time but orkut failed to recognised that it was becoming more individualistic website. People are already enough isolated, they don’t talk to each other very often but they are still curious to know what is happening in other people's life.
When people are becoming part of some group or network they would like to see the updates in their inbox (or on the screen when they open the website) and not to go to other people's scrapbook to see what is happening there. In fact orkut scrapbook is so bad that one can go to other people's scrapbook and by reading some of the history of scraps and answers knows what is going on there. one can know this thing in facebook too but only for friends.
Orkut could not recognised how to earn revenue out of this website while facebook has done it very cleverly. I am not sure how much revenue facebook is making but the way they placed ad in between of the conversations etc is quite good for the advertisers and facebook can earn high click per view.
Study of these two sites makes very clear about the cultural changes in the society in 21st century. If Google wants to make any profit out of orkut they should try to understand the society around them. They need to think out of the box in this domain because it different domain from their search engine market.
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