HackersRepublic

It is a ever-lasting debate. Weather its Orkut or Facebook. I know as of now the current leader is MySpace with more users that both Orkut and Facebook which has 67 million users each. However, with in contest of this article we will keep MySpace out of the league because it is not very popular in the country that I come from which is India and hence I havent used myspace to the extend of blogging about it. So, in this article we will concentrate on Orkut or Facebook– Which one is better today and which one will be more beneficial in the future?

I know this question is like predicting the future but listed below are a few things which i think will make a big difference on how these two social networking giants shape up.

1. Financial Backing: Orkut has the great “Google” by its side and is completely owned by Google. Facebook on the other hand has got a lot of trust from technology biggies including Microsoft which recently evaluated the Facebook to around $15 Billion. This is an estimate based on what Microsoft paid for a percentage at Facebook. So, in terms of financial backing both the companies are on par with each other.
2. Social Networking Structure: Orkut is more open in nature and for many years anyone could read anyones scraps and had several security and privacy features missing. But these flaws have been repaired to somewhat extend but as far as i am concerned Facebook has a better social networking environment. It is closed in nature with ample amount of control given to the user on what can be viewed from his profile. Facebook has an excellent feature called as “Limited Profile” which gets facebook brownie points on the social networking structure.
3. Platform: Orkut is still working on an application platform where as the application platform for facebook is quite advanced and extremely popular. In fact the facebook application platform has given rise to a new breed of programmers who are efficient on programming API’s and frameworks like that of Facebook. Google has still not completely released the openSocial API but when it comes to API’s Google is really good. So, right now Facebook is ahead when it comes to user made applications which drive most of its traffic but Orkut will definitely follow suit.
4. Ad serving: This is one thing in which Facebook fails miserably despite having an advantage. The major advantage that Facebook posses is the closed platform; hence the ads can be specifically and more accurately targeted. However, I don’t know why facebook has failed and I hope they rectify it. On the other hand Google uses its “legendary” Ad serving platform to serve ads on Orkut. Google’s Ad serving platform(Google Adsense and Google Adwords) is ofcourse tried and tested and are way ahead of Facebook in this regard. So, Orkut scores ahead of facebook in the adserving platform.
5. SPAM: New type of websites like Social networking brings in new type of SPAM. Orkut is a clutter with SPAM messages in Orkut Communities and “Send a message to all” messages that get appended to scraps. Facebook on the other hand is a clutter of application invitations and application requests. Almost all applications on Facebook ask their users to invite other members to the application. So, when it comes to SPAM, both facebook and orkut are evenly placed. Thank god that Facebook now introduced a “ignore all” feature otherwise it was a big trouble ignoring every single invitation.

So, listed above is the difference between Orkut and Facebook and i think both of thema re evenly poised for a competition of sorts. I am sure it will be a great story to follow and see how these social networking giants evolve.