Orkut vs. Facebook

An excellent article in the IEEE Internet Computing magazine entitled "Will the Overseas Expansion of Facebook Succeed?" by Yun Wan, Vaishali Kumar, and Amina Bukhari (University of Houston, Victoria) compares the take up of Facebook and Orkut -- two social networking sites -- within Pakistan and India. Wonderful coverage of how localisation and social culture impacts the choice of Internet social networking sites. The authors indicate, for instance, that "... one explanation for Orkut’s popularity in India is that it’s easy to pronounce and rhymes with the word `chirkut', which means `stupid' in the Indian dialect Gujarati." The authors emphasise the importance of the use of Facebook's Open Platform and Orkut's OpenSocial, enabling third party applications to be integrated into these systems.