In my earlier post in August 2007 - 'Orkut Celebrates India's Independence Day', I predicted that Orkut would be losing its leadership position in Indian social networking websites to Facebook in a few years. I was convinced of this by the increasing popularity of Facebook and of the fact that Google was not reacting enough to meet Facebook challenge. But Surprise! Google is not lying down.
In the last few months(after my post), we have seen the revamping of the orkut website and now Google is getting ready to outfox(or should it be out 'open'??) Facebook. Yeah! Google is opening initially orkut and iGoogle to third party developers to take on the Facebook challenge. And from there they will slowly expand to Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services. Now, we have to wait for November 5, from when on we will start getting all the gadgets and applications we would loved to have in our orkut page but Google did not have the resources to provide it to us.
Read more about how "Google is planning to out open Facebook on November 5" in Techcrunch.
Not only that, Google is getting ready to take on "Twitter" Challenge too. Twitter (micro blogging) brought both blogging and social networking together by asking people to update regularly - "What are you doing". Now, Google has bought a Twitter- clone Jaiku to enter this new area that is getting rapidly famous. Read more about it in Jaiku's Blog - We 're joining Google.
If you are asking why does Google buying Jaiku or out opening Facebook is a major issue when they have a great & an unbeatable search engine?
Just find out which Google service has the most page views per day?
In the last few months(after my post), we have seen the revamping of the orkut website and now Google is getting ready to outfox(or should it be out 'open'??) Facebook. Yeah! Google is opening initially orkut and iGoogle to third party developers to take on the Facebook challenge. And from there they will slowly expand to Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services. Now, we have to wait for November 5, from when on we will start getting all the gadgets and applications we would loved to have in our orkut page but Google did not have the resources to provide it to us.
Read more about how "Google is planning to out open Facebook on November 5" in Techcrunch.
Not only that, Google is getting ready to take on "Twitter" Challenge too. Twitter (micro blogging) brought both blogging and social networking together by asking people to update regularly - "What are you doing". Now, Google has bought a Twitter- clone Jaiku to enter this new area that is getting rapidly famous. Read more about it in Jaiku's Blog - We 're joining Google.
If you are asking why does Google buying Jaiku or out opening Facebook is a major issue when they have a great & an unbeatable search engine?
Just find out which Google service has the most page views per day?
Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.
So, what is it?
Orkut.
It makes sense that Google is aggressively entering social media space.
2 comments:
Well, it's actually good to see Google 'opening' Orkut to third-party developers. Another step in the direction of open source.. :)
But what is to be seen is how will Google leverage its presence in social space to make revenues. It has removed AdSense from Orkut as its not getting the revenues it expected. I'm quite sure they'll come up with something.
Sreeram, If they did not enter now, they stand to lose the great opportunity that social media may present. :)
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