Facebook has seen amazing growth over the last few years, and has long since established itself as the largest social network in the world. But the battle isn’t over yet — Facebook is still duking it out overseas with a number of other social networks to establish regional dominance. In India, Google-owned Orkut has nearly twice as many unique visitors as Facebook. So Facebook has taken to some fairly aggressive measures: it now actively promotes a special Orkut import tool that lets users transfer their social graphs over to Facebook. And in a fairly bizarre move, Facebook is taking the fight against Orkut back home to the United States. Where Orkut has approximately 1% of the unique visitors that Facebook does.
According to comScore, Facebook had over 92 million unique visitors in August 2009 in the United States. Orkut had around 972 thousand unique visitors. Now, it would be one thing for Facebook to simply port the tool over to the US — after all, they’ve already got the tool built. But the social network is actually advertising it to its users in the United States (the ad takes you to the Orkut friend finder). Seems a bit vicious, doesn’t it? Like sucking the last few drops of life out of something that’s on its way out anyway.
Thanks to Nick Gonzalez for the tip.
