Facebook Goes After Orkut Users in Brazil and India

Facebook is now pretty much synonymous with social networking about all over the world. Sure, there are plenty of other social networks, some quite successful like MySpace, but nothing even comes close on the global scale. Still, Facebook isn't completely satisfied until it becomes the biggest social network in every single country and is launching an all-out campaign against Google's Orkut, which enjoys a significant following in Brazil and India.

Orkut was originally launched in 2004 by a Google engineer as an independent project. The site started picking up steam and became mildly popular in the US but its users eventually started to drift towards MySpace or Friendster. At about the same time the social network became increasingly popular in Brazil to the point that eventually traffic in that country overtook the one coming from the US. Orkut is now the second most visited site in Brazil, and it gained a considerable audience in India as well, where it enjoys a rather comfortable lead.

But if Facebook has its way, these two markets will be conquered much sooner than it may seem probable. In fact, Facebook has created a contact import tool specifically designed for Orkut users, similar to the tool most other users around the world get to look for friends from Gmail, AIM, Windows Live Messenger and the likes, which may also have Facebook accounts. Facebook users in the two countries are encouraged to use the tool to download their Orkut friends list. They can then upload the file to Facebook and the social network will search to see if any of the friends have a Facebook account as well and then lets the users send friend requests to all of them.

Interestingly, the tactic may already be working in India where Orkut is seeing a big drop in traffic while Facebook keeps on growing. ComScore numbers, reported by TechCrunch, show that Orkut dropped by 800,000 users in just one month reaching 15.2 million. In the same month Facebook added another 700,000 to reach 8.2 million, encroaching fast on the Google social network.