Orkut has been going great guns in India with an ever-increasing membership base from this country. Despite it's failure in several other countries, it has been the Social Network (SN) with the greatest activity in the Indian Online Market. Hi5 tried to enter the picture and eat some "Orkut" share but that never really happened. In the world of Networking, the USP of an SN is not the array of services that it provides but the size of its membership base. A user, actively connected to all his friends through Orkut had no incentive to sign up on an entirely new community with not even a tenth of his friends, even if it claimed to provide better features. A classic case of Metcalfe's Law which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system.
Well, Orkut was sitting pretty with its lock-in of users until Gazzag happened. Gazzag realized that the only way they could eat Orkut's share was by replicating Orkut's membership base at breakneck speed. Well, that, 0r at least make the user believe that the replication was actually happening. So they wrote a cute little script which would spam every person's friends list when he added himself to Gazzag. So the user was happy since he could import his friends list from Orkut onto a new community with much better features. And a lot of those who got the spam mail did end up in Gazzag, be it out of choice or as a remedy to the frustrating spam problem.
Now that Orkut's greatest asset, its user base, is on the road to replication, it has suddenly swung into top gear improving the usability of the site. The site which had thus far remained fairly unchanged in terms of usability suddenly swung into action and made scrapping very user friendly. This was followed by its integration with Google Talk to answer Gazzag's messenger integration.I am sure Orkut could have included an in-built messenger but they chose to integrate with Google Talk instead. While this makes things slightly inconvenient while chatting on Orkut, it is a great way to get more people to sign on to Google Talk which isn't all that popular in India.The SN space in the Indian market is definitely in for a lot of dynamism in the near future.Somehow, the Community model in general and the SN model in particular looks like the perfect recipe for success in a country where relationships are valued a lot and where the strength of offline community bonds can actually spur the growth of online ones.
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