Facebook is still lagging behind Orkut and doesn’t seem to close on the gap in near future.
Facebook / Orkut / MySpace - India Traffic
In order to gain some more traction from Indian netizens, Facebook has launched the local language version (translated) in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam.
Apart from the fact that translation is badly done, what Facebook doesn’t realizes is that in India, Facebook is still for suave users and these are English-speaking only (and tier-2 users aspire to be suave –so they will not move to regional language).
What Facebook should instead have done was to provide transliteration service (Orkut does that nicely) – for people to converse in the language they are comfortable with.
Is Facebook trying to do too many trivial things? I believe it’s going through new feature = innovation syndrome (all that redesign story etc).
What’s your opinion?
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I think they are seriously looking to poach users from Orkut. First “Find your Orkut friends” on its home page and now the translated versions – will only help in that.
Oh yeah..just that it wont help them in long run.
You cant beat Orkut by poaching it’s userbase
So Faceboook is following myspace foots to spread it’s wing in India. Few months back myspace started giving a personal touch for Indian users by launching an Indian version of myspace and teaming up with MTV. Finally these social networking websites realize the potential market for their social networking websites.
Though Till not Orkut Rules the Indian Social networking market.