MARKETING MYOPIA.

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GROUP MEMBERS:
NIRAJ DUBE NEHA LODAYA PRERNA PAWAR JAIKISHAN SASWANI TANVI SANGHAVI PRASAD WALANJ 11 18 27 29 31 43

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Words would just not suffice the immense contribution which we received from all the people, in the making of our project. First and foremost we would like to thank our esteemed institute GURUNANAK INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES for the golden opportunity it provided us with. We consider it a great privilege to have been mentored by professor Ms. Annie Pillai who paved the way for the completion of our project. We would also like to thank the teaching and the non teaching staff for their valuable inputs.

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Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is
designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Bykkkten. Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Face book and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. As of October 2011, 59.1% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 27.1% and Japan with 6.7%. Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues. As of October 2011, Alexa traffic ranked Orkut.com 126th and Orkut.com.br 128th in the world; the web site currently has over 66 million active users worldwide. Over the years, Orkut has also found great popularity in Estonia as witnessed by a survey conducted by the independent research center GfK Custom Research Baltic which showed how Orkut is the most used social network platform in that country. Its popularity, however, faded in 2010, when most Indians and Estonians switched over to Facebook. Traffic on Orkut by country Traffic of Orkut on March 31, 2004 Traffic on Orkut by country Traffic of Orkut on March 31, 2004 51.36% United States 7.74% Japan 5.16% Brazil Netherlands United Kingdom Other
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4.10% 3.72% 27.92%

Traffic of Orkut on February 05, 2011 59.8% Brazil India Japan United States Pakistan Other 24.3% 8.1% 1.6% 0.6% 5.3%

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Face book Inc. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes the Web site's membership was initially
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limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumerReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site's terms of service. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users. Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-thedecade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook? "Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011. According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account. Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.Facebook filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012. Some of the applications and elements for actually making FACEBOOK a fun and the ultimate leader in the internet social networking race are as follow: MINI FEED Facebooks Mini Feed Feature (notifications) is useful in viewing a quick snapshot on the latest happenings within the network. MYORKUT The application named as myOrkut connects the Orkut profile of the user to Facebook Profile, so that one can see his/ her Orkut friends and read scraps right from Facebook without actually logging into their Orkut account. GIFTS This is a virtual gift feature that Facebook added to its website in February 2007. With the help of this application friends could send gifts to each other along with a small text message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipients wall with the message of the giver, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately. MARKETPLACE With the launch of the application named as marketplace in May 2007, Facebook allowed its users to post free classified ads.

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 EVENTS Facebook events is an application that helps the user inform the people in the network know about the upcoming events in their group and to organize social gatherings. Events can be open, closed, or secret depending upon the event creator. VIDEO Facebook video is an application built by the Facebook developers for sharing videos on Facebook, Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. URL CHANGE The most recent and the last change on the Facebook website was URL Change. Facebook introduced this feature in June 2009 that allowed users to choose a Facebook username to make user location easier. The user is able to direct others to their page through a simple link such as www.Facebook,com/username rather than an otherwise complex URL. This feature spread very quickly on Facebook, with more than 55,000 users registering URL change within 24 hours after the launch.

DESIGN

Facebook is a great deal professional looking networking website where as Orkut looks to some extent unfinished and the themes make it cartoonish. In Facebook everything is closely integrated in the home page from messaging, to friends update, invites, status update, news feed, links, suggestions, highlights, requests, chat, events and Etc where as in Orkut everything is limply coupled which made it less likable compared to Facebook. There is an issue that Facebook has a little entry barrier for new folks, rather I would like to comment that FB has a simple and professional user interface to which an intelligent user can easily understand at first
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glance. Though I found ease of accessibility, simplicity in the design and quick access through all the pages within the profile earlier at Orkut, but recently when Orkut introduced its new feature of Themes Library, I personally started disliking the site on the issues of speed and appearance. Users could change their interface from a wide range of colorful theme library and this lead to slower downloading of the whole system. APPLICATIONS

With over more than 10,000 application in numbers, Facebook Apps are much better than Orkut. Despite the fact that Orkut was head of Facebook in the beginning it failed to provide new features and updated apps that Facebook provided in the longer run. Im not astonished to find Orkut ripping several features and ideas from its competitor product in utter despondency. Another annoying thing what most of the user dont like and Google did not refrain by displaying it is- Bad Bad Server, no donut for you! dialogue. It seriously irritates anyone. STATUS UPDATES

Facebook, much similar to Orkut has a micro-blogging feature of status updates which allows users to inform their friends of their current whereabouts, actions, or thoughts. Nevertheless, Facebook proves to be far improved than the latter here again for it allows the people in the network to post their comments and express their likeness towards the post by clicking on like it option. Above all, Whats on your mind? preference at Facebook let the user share photos, videos and links through attachments within their networks itself. SECURITY

The security feature is more powerful in Facebook compared to Orkut, On FB one is able to view the profile of others only when the latter is among your connections. Within Orkut you can view peoples profiles details, communities joined, photos, friends, etc regardless if they are a friend or not. Open scraps and profiles hence owes to less security. CHAT

Just as Orkut allow its users to integrate Gtalk within their interface, as of 23rd April, 2008, Facebook Chat was released for the entire FB user base enabling chat with friends on a one-toone basis. Though both Facebook and Orkut has the feature of chat within their site, well again Facebook is better at this aspect too on the point that it has the facility where one can be invisible to an individual or a group of people. ACCOUNT NAME

One of the most important reasons why I love Facebook and give full points to it is the directness and the reality that they expect from the user when asking for the Account Name or the profile name as one may say. Worst part about Orkut as I mentioned before is that it seems to be more like a cartoonish thing to me. At times it is really difficult or an impossible task to decipher the actual owner of the account from the disgusting and irrelevant profile names they have (above all
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the profile picture is uploaded of a celebrity and the list of communities and friends are endless and indescribably weird). COMMUNITY & GROUPS

Groups and communities found on Orkut are most of the time repetitive and have untold figures of duplicates (that too existing together with the same community name). Facebook on the other hand maintains a feature of unique groups and communities. From my personal experience I add that at Orkut people are more concentrated at number and quantity but Facebook strives for the quality. All the more in Orkut beyond 80% of the communities are a waste and are filled with craps of ideas and classified advertisements from individuals as the forum topics within the community with no relation with each other from anywhere. Orkut has now become a mere place of advertisement, unhealthy entertainment and exponential spamming.

CAUSE OF REAL DECLINE OF ORKUT

What I feel to be the main reason for the downfall of the ORKUT in India was its sudden gain of popularity among youth. Yes, its shocking to accept, I know. Since Orkut had once become the talk of the teens and young, the site started flooding with new members. Having a registered account on Orkut became a must. Above and beyond Orkut started facing very peculiar problems of fake profiles, flooding, spamming & even track of criminal activities going over the interface. Owing to the deactivation of the jail system and high number of profile counts, the unnecessary profiles were often left unresolved or, when removed, recreated easily. Such profiles were normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It was not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds..!! Another signpost to the collapse of the networking site, Orkut, was Floodtudo (a freeware program made in Delphi in August 2005, by a Brazilian developer). A big spam wave struck Orkut soon when this program which was specifically meant for flooding Orkut was massively used by thousands of spammers all over. There are several more causes for Orkut losing against many other networking sites like Facebook; but aforementioned are some of the points that I feel to be the root cause. According to me Orkut had earlier proved to be dominating and better than all other networking sites in every aspects for it be in ease of accessibility, GUI friendliness, up to-date apps and softwares, strong security & Etc. But Microsofts cunning plan to suppress Googles such domination over internet by heavily funding Facebook at the right time helped Facebook to get good data centers, and boost its overall performance (finally resulting in the victory of Facebook in the tariff race among the social networking site) I think that Google really needs to work hard on Orkut to regain the part of market share it actually deserves. It would not be very tough for Google to do so because it already have the user base, all it needs to do is to pull the uses back to Orkut. Also, if the fall of orkut continues it is destined to have the same face as Yahoo! 360 degree which have already called its service a close on 13 July, 2009. Wishing that Orkut does not follow its lead because after all I have an account at Orkut.
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The service was launched as an invitation-only "field test". Early invites were soon suspended due to an "insane demand" for new accounts. On September 20, 2011; Google+ was opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need for an invitation. It was opened for a younger age group (13+ years old in US and most countries, 14+ in South Korea and Spain, 16+ in Netherlands) on January 26, 2012. Google+ integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, and introduces new services identified as Circles, Hangouts and Sparks. Google+ is available as a website and on mobile devices. Sources such as The New York Times have declared it Google's biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook which has over 800 million users. Google+ is considered the company's fourth foray into social networking, following Google Buzz (launched 2010, retired in 2011), Google Friend Connect (launched 2008, to be retired by March 2012) and orkut (launched in 2004, now operated entirely by subsidiary Google Brazil). On January 19, 2012, it was reported that Google+ had surpassed a user base of 90 million. According to independent analysis of its growth in December 2011, the site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a day, which may total 400 million members by the end of 2012.The site's popularity accelerated in December 2011, with almost a quarter of its total user base joining in December alone, said Paul B. Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, who tracks the numbers as the "unofficial statistician" for Google+. However, on February 28, 2012 Todd Wasserman from Mashable reported Google+ users are only spending 3.3 minutes monthly on Google+ which is a downward trend from 4.8 minutes in December and 5.1 minutes in November compared to Facebook users currently spending 7.5 hours using Facebook monthly.

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Google with its new Google+ which is giving a stiff competition to Facebook and Twitter. Google+ in a short span of time has gained much momentum and has acquired praise also. People are streaming in to check out the fresh and happening look of G+. The +1 feature sets Google+ apart from all the rest. Its around 2.3 billion times that the +1 feature of Google Plus is being clicked. The story of Google Pluss success doesnt end here. Almost 1 billion items are being displayed, shared, sent or/and received every single day on Google Plus. Users have loved it so much that the number of users have reached to around 10 million in a span of few days. Speaking out these figures loud might actually make us awestruck, but its still not that huge to Google. Google Plus has steadily carved a milestone by surpassing Facebook and Twitter. FourSquare took almost two years to reach the level where Google Plus is now in a time span of just few weeks. The success graph of Google Plus is soaring high and high. All that we are left to do is to see it rise above all the other social networking platforms For years, Google has been making attempts to make a place in the social networking world, but somehow it seemed that Google still hadnt mastered the various human laws that rules the social networking platforms. But now with Google Plus, the notion has undergone a huge change. Facebook, which was the at the top now has something to fear. The proof is here. Facebook has removed the Facebook friend Exporter which gave the users the leisure to import data of the Facebook Friends, including the e-mail addresses and various other information that were shared with mutual consent. Now Facebook has blocked it. The e-mail addresses are now being removed from the Facebook user profile information, which substantiates the fact that Facebook has already understood the threat that Google Plus poses to it.

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The Circles in Google Plus is fun. The concept is fresh and the look is cool. The concept of creating various circles like Friends, Acquaintances, Family, Following is really amazing and is engaging too. It almost brings our real life online, just the way we would like to segregate the people we meet, similarly here we can do something similar by grouping them. The feature that sets Google Plus apart from the rest is that the personal information of a user is owned not by the social networking site but by the owner himself/herself. Data portability is now easy with Google Takeout. The leading brands or artists yet do not have a business page till date. Google Plus now opens up another interesting avenue Here enter Google Plus with its new feature that is in its testing phasethe option to create a Brand Page. Social networks have helped the users to establish a connection with the offline and online worlds. The way Facebook helped in sharing thoughts, pictures, videos and creating a whole new world of ones own, it was a matter of thought whether Google will ever launch anything to connect. Google Plus is the answer to the question that was doing the rounds all these days. Yes, its Google Plus with its +1 will be the next big thing among all the social networks. In few days, Google and Facebook are pitted against each other.

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