For the longest time I wondered what Orkut had done wrong. Initially, I thought maybe it was Facebook’s college affiliations that won over credibility and stole the crowds. Then I mused on how the difference could be Facebook Apps, a definite unique selling point over Orkut in 2006. But now I have a completely different view. I beleive the global shift to Facebook (barring Indians and Brazilians who seemingly are the only inhabitants of Orkut left) was because of Orkut’s inability to scale in its baby days. The frequent “no donut for you” message may have been an expression of Google’s typical sense of humour but it certainly didn’t leave much to laugh about as Facebook gave everyone their..umm..donuts.
The explosion of social community websites has completely flipped the web paradigm. Where in the nineties, we had elite companies spoon-feeding us content, we now have a concept of generating content on our own through massive collaboration, individual creativity and social experiences. People themselves are the central content. People want to know other people are doing, what pictures they are taking and what videos they are getting embarassed in.
With this ongoing battle from friendster to MySpace to what not, I stand at this point wondering how the race track looks like in the world of socialy community websites.
So, I picked five of my favorite social sites that I had accounts on and compared the number of unique visitors that they attracted per month. I used compete.com to get the stats and found out that the leaderboard looks like this:
For June 2009
1. Facebook – 122 Million
2. Twitter – 22 Million
3. LinkedIn – 12 Million
4. Hi5 – 2.3 Million
5. Orkut – 0.5 Million
Well, no surprises there except for the fact that Orkut’s approval ratings seem to be waning even when compared to Hi5 – which I don’t believe to be a showstopper app thats caused many waves in the market. In fact, Hi5 trounces Orkut’s visitor count by nearly 5 times so either Orkut’s completely lost out or Hi5 is smartly marketing their product to a loyal niche. And the more recent Twitter phenomenon has truly made a ground-breaking entrance to the market, sweeping millions into its tweeting influence.
Also, Facebook’s undisputed and gargantuous kingship is reinforced by the gaping hole between Facebook’s trend line and the cluster of ‘others’ beneath it. This is what I call extreme pwnage. And it looks like Zuckerberg’s precious is not going stop there – the line’s getting steeper !
If you really want to know how rampant Facebook’s popularity is, then the following will give you an idea:
I compared other popular websites with FB including myspace, flickr, Digg and the search Giant Google.com.
The rankings came out like this:
1. Google
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Digg
5. Flickr
Notice how Facebook was trailing behind MySpace till late last year but then it kick started its jet pack and simply took off like an airplane to a point that it now has twice the amount of users i.e. it doubled its count in just 5 months ! Moreover, FB s just 30 thousand visitors behind Google and their trend lines are well on their way to converge. That speaks volumes. Never knew that virtual socializing could surpass the universal need to find information.
So, whats’ next ? Will Facebook evenutally monopolize ? Will Twitter catch up ? Will Google throw out a curve ball to unsettle things in the social sphere ? Is there something else out there that will turn the tables around ?
I guess time will tell.
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