Google’s social networking initiatives seem to be in a complete free–fall and now the killer nail in the coffin could has been hit. Orkut which has always been successful only in the Indian and Brazilian markets, had over the past year or so stagnated in its growth. According to latest figures (July 2010) by the comScore report, Facebook has finally surpassed Orkut to become the number 1 social networking site in India.
According to the survey, Facebook is the top most social networking site in terms of numbers (20.9 million) in July, a growth of 179% over the previous year. Orkut is ranked second (19.9 million) visitors with a growth of just 16%. Twitter has the highest growth among the top five social networking sites (239%). Interestingly both the social networking sites of Yahoo are present in the top 10.
Many of us have discussed many a times as to why Facebook is not as popular in India as Orkut or why Orkut is going down…
But now the main question now is – Does this signal the beginning of the end of Orkut?
There are a lot of factors which surely make me agree to that fact –
Contents
Orkut did not manage to keep up pace with time
Online Media today is an ever changing concept and one has to keep pace with the change. First there was Hotmail, then Yahoo chat rooms, then Hi5 and many other social networks between 04-06 most of which have disappeared today. Orkut didn’t manage to keep pace with the change ever as it was never innovative and didn’t upgrade itself in time
Privacy Issues, Spam and Fake accounts
Orkut had a lot of privacy issues and much more spam and fake accounts (though these problems were improved later on) which created problems for it in other countries and therefore restricted its development only to Brazil and India
False Expectations
If one were to bluntly state it, Orkut always thought that it will be the leader in India and never expected Facebook to destroy it. But one can ignore his / her competitors only at their peril
Copied instead of Innovating
Google tried developing some new applications and copying quite a few features of Facebook onto Orkut to revive it. But after these attempts failed, it just left the whole idea of saving it completely.
Google has already left Orkut to die a slow death as is shown by its attempts on acquiring every company left, right and center to enter the social media domain. However, there is slight ray of hope for Google – Google Me – I think Google’s future in Social Media space will be decided by this soon-to-be-launched Social Media platform.
Orkut has reached the decline stage; Facebook is reaching the saturation stage while Twitter is in the growth stage.
Your thoughts ?