Facebook beats Orkut in India

Google has tried – and tried hard – to make success on the ever-growing market of the social networks, but seems not to succeed. Google’s take on the social network, Orkut, was successful only in India and Brazil – but Brazil seems to be the last resort for this site, as Facebook has surpassed Orkut in India, as far as traffic is concerned.

According to ComScore, India’s social network usage has grown 43% from last July to this July, the number of social networking users with ages of 15 and above rising over 33 million – 84% of the country’s total number of internet users. Facebook has become the leader of the social networking market in India, its user base growing to 20.9 million – a 179% growth, surpassing Orkut’s 19.9 million users.

ComScore’s study contains numbers concerning home and work users, but it does not include mobile users and users connecting to the internet through publicly accessible computers (such as internet cafes), so these numbers may be a little off, but probably not too much.

Orkut was founded by Google in 2004. It has never been a great success in the United States or the rest of the world, but has been a great success in Brazil and India, where it has stopped Facebook from gaining market supremacy – until now. It seems, Orkut’s last resort is Brazil.

Let’s see if Google’s reported attempt to gain market share using social gaming will have the potential to compete with the ever-growing social networking giant, Facebook.