Will Facebook win over Orkut in India?

Talk to any school/college going kid and you do hear the “orkut” sound byte often in their conversations. Kids are very internet savvy in India today, but mostly in Tier-I cities. I am waiting to see that kind of growth in Tier-II cities. I heard about Orkut from my teenager kid. Her entire class (may be even school) seems to be on Orkut. So far it has been “clean fun” for them. The definition of “clean fun” varies depending on whom you ask – the parent or the kid. I guess you can call it generation gap.

Just when you thought Orkut is the unshakable #1 player you hear about Facebook. This too was introduced to me by my kid (is she really studying these days??)

Feature wise Facebook beats Orkut. I did have some issues with Facebook’s UI but finally figured it out. The Facebook API enables outside web developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook environment. This is way too cool. Just read about 65 million applications were written in the very first month since the Facebook Platform was announced.

Articles such as “How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google” are floating around. Mr. Gates has yet another reason to be upset, MSN doesn’t feature in that article. The legendary Marc Andreessen too has analyzed the Facebook Platform.

Anything that can “possibly” shake Google surely gets attention, a LOT of attention. Social Networking sites in India have a lot of work to do to get the attention of kids in India.