Google's Orkut adds new features to keep up with Facebook in India

According to The Wall Street Journal, ComScore reported Orkut registered 20 million unique users compared to Facebook’s 21 million in July. Compared to the same period last year, Facebook has jumped 179 per cent while Orkut grows with only 16 per cent.

Orkut’s new selling points are specialising content for different kinds of ‘friends’. According to the Orkut Blog, Google has developed a ‘scraps to multiple people’ function, which let users send the same message to a selected group of people without copying and pasting the information separately.

Orkut has also increased privacy levels among connections with ‘privacy in groups’. People can target a specific list of friends and share messages without going public.

‘Groups of friends’ categorises the list of connections in simple tabs like ‘everyone’, ‘family’ and ‘work’. The new tools are to make social networking easier when users want to separate info sharing from friends to bosses. More functions are said to be in the pipe line.

In February 2010, Orkut registered a reach of 46.8 per cent in the social networking market in India.

Orkut was launched in 2004, but only florished in India and Brazil.