facebook or orkut choice to be made

Today i was reading my RSS feeds and got this intresting article describing the status of social network’s in india.

The article  mainly states that orkut is still leading the India market and facebook (world no 2) is still no where to be close to orkut in India.

The reason for low usage of facebook in india is basically for few reason’s that i found while using facebook as well as orkut both.

1) orkut is more popular due to its straight forward approach, it offer’s limited features only.

2) most orkut user’s are just chat freaks and are their only for fun and time pass.

3) orkut captures a large crowd from college students who love to sneak and peak in others profile (got this point from one of the comment in the article above.)

4) facebook is a heavy site, specially if you have more then 30-40 apps installed, (mainly due to its AJAX style good for DSL connection but appears to be a pain in A** for the dialup users)

BUT there are a lot of reason’s which put facebook as my preference.

1) It provides privacy, more then what i can expect in orkut.

2)  with its app base used properly you can create a virtual  home for you in their, like i keep a tab of my movies as well as music with two apps flixter’s movie app and iLike app for facebook.

3) i am a social networker with my orkut profile reaching the 400 mark and my facebook profile now reaching close to 75, but still i prefer networking with people with whom i can interact and gain something from this interaction. and in this case i find facebook to be of much help.

Ex: i took an IQ test and now i can search for people with IQ level equal to me or greater then me, and then a simple message let me in.

4) Another great feature of facebook which many user’s in India are largely unaware of is photo tagging,by which you can tag each individual face on your pic collection with a name.

These are few of my finding’s

many people might disagree with me, and many might agree with me.

also for your references.

My orkut profile

My facebook profile

UPDATE

As per some comments on this post i am making a clarification here,

As per akhil’s comment

Privacy issue

1) well if you compare not able to check on other people’s profile without their permission is a hard head, then check it back on the critisim of facebook section, ther main concern is privacy only.

take for example email theft, any programmer with a bit of knowledge of data mining can get a lot more then just thousands of email id’s on orkut within few hours time coz mails are in plaintext format, compared to facebook which uses pic’s to show mail id.

regarding virtual home concept

2) well for the virtual home case, my point is our first network begin’s at our home and how we establish it by liking few and disliking few how his liking and disliking came in, they came by thier behaviour towards us or other’s as well as their liking and disliking.
In the same way facebook helps you to communicate with your friends circle not as a different id’s but as different person’s.

3) and for the privacy issue and regarding that article, that privacy concern is regarding the facebook owner’s side and not from the user’s point of view.
and to check some for the orkut side, check you orkut account and see that the ad’s displayed are content sensitive, (a google speciality), did you tried to guess how it comes from, and don’t you thing it is too easy for someone who stores your data to use it in what ever way he may like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

http://www.google-watch.org/krane.html : another good read out for those concerned with privacy.

On a side note, besides orkut or facebook,

now a days creating an online persona of yourself is not a big deal if you go with proper channel.
you can start with simple web site taking design help from this place. and if you wish to have an interactive site the best bet as of now is to go with blogging, when it comes to blogging you can start with a small web host plan from a reliable provider like bluehost. and when you thing you have got enough grip of the things and wish to expend more then you can have a dedicated server very easily, now a days if you wish to start blogging you can easily get your host set-up as well as complete site up and running with in half an hour time gap. but a word of caution before diving deep into the world of blogging please have a close look at this ACT CONCERNING ONLINE ADVERTISING AND PRIVACY.

BEST OF LUCK WITH YOU SELECTION