According to Compete, Orkut, which is the default social networking site in India, is only ranked #8 in terms of attention and an even more lowly #22 in terms of number of visitors, amongst all social networking sites.
The question to ask here is: for a precocious teenager in Kolkata, what is more important -
- That MySpace is 300 times bigger than Orkut?
- That a million other social networking sites offer more advanced features than both Orkut and MySpace?
- That all her friends have profiles on Orkut?
The key to building a successful social networking site is to own a niche. MySpace owns the bigger niche (USA), but Orkut owns the niches that will grow faster (Brazil and India). These numbers will look very different in a few years from now.
Compete compares Technorati and Google Blogsearch traffic data to find what I knew anyway - Technorati kicks Google’s ass in blog search -
Technorati grew monthly unique visitors 91% and pageviews 138% in Q1. During the same time period, Google grew unique visitors by only 39% and pageviews by 47%. In both absolute and relative terms, Technorati is dominating Google.