iSMOblog

After having observed the social networking phenomenon for quite some time now, I decided to find out which one of the most used social networking websites, i.e. Orkut or Facebook, is more popular and why.  I actually thought that by reading various blogs, visiting various different forums, talking to different people who use these sites etc. would be enough to find out who is the winner out of these two…but alas, I was wrong. All I got was a variety of mixed responses and they only added to the confusion. Here is a meagre attempt to discuss the pros and cons of both- Orkut and Facebook.

Orkut is ‘the’ most popular website in India and Brazil whereas Facebook is the favorite social networking website for America and Europe (MySpace is also a competition…but we are not talking about it here!).

Apart from this, both Orkut and Facebook are disliked for some reasons or the other. First and foremost, Orkut offers you only basic social networking facilities. Whereas, Facebook has a number of other cool applications such as quizzes, Flixster, iLike etc. These make Facebook much more interesting. Orkut is said to have a number of drawbacks such as the fact that it does not allow its user to upload a number of photographs at once, the deletion of photographs has to be done one by one, tagging a user is not allowed, organizing the scraps as per your friends is not allowed and so on. SMS alerts, like those on Facebook, are also a missing feature. Some of these features are there on Facebook and thus it automatically gets that extra edge.

However, this inference is not enough to prove that it is better than Orkut in every way. People who are big fans of Orkut have a number of things to say in its favour as well. Or rather I should be saying that these people have a number of things to say against Facebook. Some people are of the opinion that Facebook has too many things and thus is slow whereas Orkut is really very user friendly. Privacy options are not that strong and efficient in Orkut’s case, hence people are easily able to trace conversations through scraps etc. which makes it fun to use (don’t know if it is a good thing or not!). Moreover, the profile page and links on Orkut are much more systematic and organized. The Google tag attached with Orkut is a major advantage in itself. The name ‘Google’ is enough to build trust and attract users. More so, Orkut is said to be constantly improving and is considered to be introducing more and more features on a regular basis, which offers something new to its users every time.

The debate however remains open-ended. Which of these is better is completely an individual’s choice. So, whichever suits your needs and requirements better, just stick onto it. Happy Orkutting and Happy Facebooking! (If at all these two words exist!)
Cheers!