Can Google+ avenge Orkut?

There were days, when Orkut was known as the king among the number of social networking sites. Since its inception in 2005 when Orkut banged the internet world with lots of features like chat, sending messages across under the heading scrap, sharing pictures, multiplying N number of people or friends in your network and so on. Within a span of few months, it got the right momentum bringing almost every Tom, Dick, and Harry over this popular social networking site called Orkut.

The dominance continued for several years since it was backed by the powerful Google group, however, the jinx broke, when Facebook gained momentum since a couple of years making it number one in the world of social media. With lots of new features added at facebook and more privacy it has around 750 million users all across the world. Thus a huge paradigm shift was seen within a year or so from Orkut to Facebook for the reasons like it provided more room for privacy, clean design, plugins, pokes, feedback of activities and so on.

However, with Facebook ruling the current Social Media, Google though was seen trying a couple of things at Orkut like adding themes and renaming the section of scraps into conversations. Despite all efforts of defying Facebook with these features, Orkut was not able to regain its position of Number One. On the contrary, Facebook was consistent in its growth and embarked as the biggest competitor to Google. Moreover, this paradigm shift also led many brands and business house shift from Orkut to Facebook to cater a large number of chunks with their products and services. Though Facebook was not hard on the heels as groups like Google, yet its accelerating growth led a threatening call to cast its new image in the form of Google plus as Orkut was seen into fringes of internet at least for the users of Social Media.

Google has again entered into the world of social networking with Google Plus with new strategies and games section unlike what you get to see at Facebook. There is a section called ‘hangout’ which is nothing but a video chat, where more than two users can come together anytime, through the plugin ‘Check-in’ and share their whereabouts unlike what we see on Facebook Places and Foursquare. At one go, Google+ seems to resemble like Facebook though, with more grip on privacy control with clean and elegant design. However, still in the nascent stage, though have a sizeable amount of users signed up with it reaching to an impressive figure. However, on further analyzing this data, this figure merely indicates that most of these users are already active on Facebook, and have signup just to have a look over it and can be called as passive users, who will take time to gear up.

Now the question is whether Google+ would avenge its old networking site –Orkut and beat Facebook. However, it’s still a tough task to predict anything. Moreover, experts feel that the virtual war or competition between Facebook and Google Plus is nothing but a media created hype in order to keep the world busy in debating and discussing in the media. Second, experts also consider a search made on internet at any search engine and using social networking platform to be poles apart. Search engine are meant for different roles, their expansion of user base would always be limited, and however, social networking platforms have the capacity to enlarge users over them. Social networking websites work as per the people’s social psychology giving them virtual space to interact and communicate across people, which is not the case with search engines.

Google, however, would continue to lead the search engine world, though running the domain of Social Networking vis-à-vis business governed by search engine can be always a failure as how we saw in the case of Orkut. If Google treads the similar path with Google Plus, probably, the result would be the same and this is where the Facebook is different.

About the author: Amanda Kidd is a writer and blogger who happens to be a health buff. Apart from health and parenting, writing for a tech site is something she enjoys very much.  She also has a keen interest in Contemporary Design. She has a weak side for gadgets and beauty products and loves collecting them. Recently she added an Outlook Express 7 to her laptop.