Social networking giants War between Facebook and Orkut

A WAR BETWEEN GIANTS

As we all know facebook is becoming more and more popular as compared to orkut.So we take a look into each others features precisely and also the reasons why facebook is outperforming orkut.

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FACEBOOK

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Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Since September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address can become a Facebook user. Facebook's target audience is more for youths than adults. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include (potentially) any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.

10 hidden features of FACEBOOK:-

1. Tag other people in status updates

This feature was released earlier this week and is not well understood by the majority of Facebook users. For those of us that are savvy to Twitter, it’s a pretty simple transition as it functions the same way. You call someone out or speak directly to them by typing the @ symbol and then their name in your status update or on someone else’s wall. Facebook has programmed the feature to not only tag them, but also link to the said person’s Facebook page. Once you’ve posted your tag, anyone who sees the status update will see your friends name posted as a hyperlink and have the option of navigating to his or her page.

2. Block people on chat

This feature wasn’t available when Facebook chat launched. As a woman, my initial experience was not always good when up late working - lonely dudes would pop-up to say “hello,” looking to find out what I was “up to tonight.” Creepy. Thankfully FB has finally provided the option to prohibit this from happening. To block people from chat, you have to organize them under one group which you can then choose to be inactive in chat. Be careful though, if they’re filed under another group as well (i.e. “work friends” and “block from chat”),they will still show up in chat under the group that you haven’t blocked!

3. Create a “top friends” list, without an app

That’s right, just like MySpace, you can easily separate your top friends from the rest so everyone can see who your favorite people are, without using an external app! It is a new feature that was introduced when Facebook unveiled their new layout. To edit your top friends, view your own profile and click the “edit” button in the friends section. Type the names of your friends who you want to be permanently highlighted on your friends list and they will remain there until you remove or replace them.

4. Login with your username

Another newly introduced feature, Facebook makes it easier to login by giving you the option of entering your username instead of your email. The ease of this option is especially noticeable when logging in from a mobile device where typing can be time consuming and awkward. Don’t have a username yet? Go tofacebook.com/username and pick your vanity URL!

5. Edit the tabs on your profile

Just click the “+” button in your tabs section to choose which applications you’d like easier navigation to. This feature makes it simple to promote a cause that’s important to you or encourage people to join you on YoVille. Oh no, did I really just give advice on how to further promote YoVille?

6. Publicize your event without sending annoying messages

Easy to do, just change the time on your event and everyone on the list will get a notification of the time change in the bottom right hand corner of their homepage. This is a very subtle way to remind people about your event!

7. Select multiple people at a time for Facebook event invites

By default, Facebook doesn’t allow you to invite your whole friends list to your event, obviously as a measure to reduce spam. You can get around this, however, if you take the time to organize all of your friends into specific groups - Facebook does allow you to select all in a given group or network for quick inviting!

8. Restrict your wall activity

If you’re spending too much time looking at your own wall or tired of friends posting inappropriate comments that family and co-workers can see, you can disable wall posts from specific people to keep your reputation, and perhaps sanity, in tact.

9. Use your friend groups to easily send messages

Compose a message on Facebook and easily send to all your friends by typing their names in the ”To” line. The big downside is that you can’t blind carbon copy (bcc) anyone, and anyone who responds will send their message to the whole group. Be cautious when sending group messages and be sure everyone on list would benefit from getting updates and responses from other group members. Otherwise it’s best and more respectful to take the time to send individual messages.

10. Changing Your Privacy Settings

For those of us who use Facebook regularly, we probably know how to do this, but I still run into a lot of people who don’t. If you don’t want the boss to know what you’re “really” doing at work, lump him into a group titled “work friends” and tweak that group’s settings from viewing your status updates and anything else you don’t want them to see. Facebook privacy settings are incredibly specific - you can personalize each list to see, or not see, pretty much anything on your profile, giving you total control over your personal brand.

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NOW WE SHOULD KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT ORKUT:-

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Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

FEATURES:-

An Orkut user can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There is an option to integrate GTalk (An instant messenger from Google) with Orkut enabling chatting and file sharing. Currently GTalk has been integrated in Orkut - users can directly chat from their Orkut page.

Themes

A new feature in Orkut is Themes. Users can change their interface from a wide range of colorful themes in library. Themes are currently only available in India, Brazil and Pakistan.It is one of the limitation in orkut.

Other miscellaneous features

Members can make groups to join friends according to their wishes. Further, each member can become a fan of any of the friends in their list and can also evaluate whether their friend is "Trustworthy", "Cool", "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 (marked by icons) and this is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Unlike Facebook, where a member can view profile details of people only on their network, Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List" (this feature has been recently changed so that users can choose between showing their profile to all networks or specified ones). Importantly, each member can also customize their profile preferences and can restrict information that appear on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list). Another feature is that any member can add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be informed only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".

Now we have known their features its time to enter into WAR.Why users like FACEBOOK rather than ORKUT...take a look here

Both facebook and orkut are good social networking sites, each being equally popular. Only thing I can do is tell you their (relative) advantages.

-----Orkut's Advantages Over Facebook----
-Easy to use interface with a very uncomplicated homepage. Facebook is ery complicated with lot of boxes (I sometimes get confuses between my homepage and my title page)
-Communities are much easy to use and hence a lot more informative.
-Writing scraps is easy as compared to facebook where can send only messages.
-Orkut is collaborated with google. So once you have gmail account, there no need to create a seperate account for orkut or other useful resources like picasa, youtube, etc. (This is the main reason I would suggest you to have an orkut account or rather a gmail account. If you have gmail, your orkut account is created by default)

-----Facebook's Advantages Over Orkut----
-Much more secure where even if you make someone as your friend, still you can limit the access he can have to your profile. In orkut also you can share your photo albums selectively, but here you need to specify the people who can access, and not who can't(If you have 300 friends you will need to specify their names, say 298, if you want to block 2 friends).
-Also in facebook, if a person isn't there your friend list, he cant even access your profile. This is best thing done in terms of awarding spam.
-Uploading photos is easier as facebook provides its own photo upload tool, hencew no need to worry about file formats and sizes.

Now lets take a look at the stastistics of users strength of both

Orkut traffic reduced by 7.7% last year while faceook traffic increased by 69.5%.

so finally

-Facebook has better privacy than orkut.
-Facebook has more members and more legit members.People all around world use facebook.
-Facebook has lots of nice applications,specially games like farmville, mafiawars and all are very addictive.
-Facebook shows latest updates from our friends. We can easily publish/share messages, pictures and information to all our friends.(best)
-We can upload pictures and videos directly from webcam or from our mobile and share it in facebook.
-We can connect to many social websites,blogs,portals using facebook and even login to them using facebook account.. it is like passport.

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