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.
Looks like some good free advertising for orkut
Go Facebook. A business is a business. Stop this sappy shit.
Send out the executioners. Facebook is doing some cleansing.
A free market is about competition. If you want a friend, get a dog.
how you know if there could very well be 500,000 Indians (coolies we call them here, nothing racist) are on Orkut in the USA? Thus somehow could influence their cousins in the mainland?
One of those ‘coolies’ got Nobel prize this year, and a few of them helped to start Sun and Google..
and your friggin point coolie lover?
@Anti Matter – You are bullshit!! INDIANS ARE THE BEST EVER THAN AMERICANS IN ANY WAY.. Thats why you Americans are so-called ‘friggin point’ lovers…! You are serious bullshit… Go to Hell!!!
Tell it to the British Brownie
“coolie” isn’t racist? Do you even know what that term means? So I guess “honky” and “cracker” aren’t racist terms either?
from what know it is a form of labor gang. what’s racist in low wage earners?
Maybe it is to grab the Indians in US who use Orkut more frequently. Many Indians in US use Orkut to keep in touch with their friends in India. It will be consistent to give Indians, home and abroad, the same options.
Smart point Arby
Not surprising. Facebook is the Microsoft of social media.
http://www.twit...cial-media.html
Maybe somebody @Facebook misunderstood the word Indian and missed their target: Indian (native) american or Indian from India?
google never cared about winning any social war. everyone would hate on them too much if they had a powerful social presence. appears that would attract alot of social gossip monopolistic attention they dont want while they’re counting money. this is obvious.
How come everyone excepts Facebooks “unique visitors” as “real” users?
Their are so many clans on Facebook who create 1,000s of bot accounts to help dominate game apps. (Think Zynga)
Not to mention casual users who just make one extra account to keep “real friends” separate from the “game friends”
And don’t start with the unique IP crap because creating new/unique IP address is as easy as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V
It’s a simple acquisition tactic.
Users on Orkut are, by definition, interested in social networking. Converting them is easier (given the import tool) than acquiring people who are yet to join the revolution…
I joined Orkut after this post.
This is ridiculous. Facebook has had all sorts of issues lately and since last night I can’t even get into it. It says “cannot display webpage” and I also get “diagnose connection problem”, but obviously the issue isn’t on my end since I can go anywhere on the internet EXCEPT for facebook.
I’m thinking they can’t handle as many people as they have and their servers are overloading. I’m getting tired of Facebook crashing in the middle of a game, or not updating my news feeds, or not letting me add friends…. so to top it all off now I can’t even log in.
I say boycott fb and get rid of it. I believe that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going back to MySpace. At least I can play the same games there and not have to worry about it crashing all the time.
Facebook is turning into a piece of junk. Maybe they can take that to the bank.
Agreed.. enough of Facebook for me. Have been on there since 2007. Gotta accept the fact that nothing is forever…. especially on the Web. You hearing Facebook?
1000+ employees.. LOL… ahhh someone wake me up and slap me the hell out of this 1999 bubble bust dream please.
Time for the next new big thing on the web.