Why In the world did Orkut become this popular?

6 Million users !!!!
Now, that is without a single Cent spent for advertising. Lets make that figure a little more real. There will be a lot of people with multiple accounts so, lets take a million and a half from that;then,spammers and other such fraudulent accounts will count up to five hundred thousand. So, that leaves us with 4 Million which by itself is a really big number considering the fact that the number of Internet users in India is just above 40 million ,10 % of that is huge considering the fact that orkut is relatively young.

Now what drives people to Orkut? To answer this we have to first see what kind of people you find on orkut. Mainly you find 5 categories of people on orkut, they are people looking for old friends , people looking to make new friends , people trying to find information about some thing , advertisers , porn mongers.

The sheer excitement that one gets when he sees a long lost friend's profile is what addicts most people to orkut. Now why are the other social networking sites not becoming this popular? The main reason is there are a lot of people on Orkut. Now you stand a better chance in finding an old friend on orkut than on any other site. The large number of serious users on Orkut has resulted in a very rich pool of informative contacts , that by itself is bring more activity on orkut now. You find people that have never met talking about how to look after their babies or what not.

One major thing about orkut is that no one has seen any advertisement from Orkut asking them to join. One joins orkut only and only because some asks you to join and usually this some is a close friend so people tend to relate orkut to close friend thus, building a bond with orkut and also the related trust.

But, is orkut safe? No, its not. Like any other social place, there are all kinds of people so, you have to take all precautions that you take at any public place on orkut also. Would you print thousands of copies of your personal photos and give to every person you see on the road? I don't think so. So don't do that on orkut either, simple. We all know how to keep ourselves safe in other public places and orkut is as safe as any other public place. The fact that the administrators of orkut treat it as a public place is another reason why orkut is so popular, people don't like being told what to and what not to do. Orkut has a TOS, but it does no policing. This relative freedom attracts a lot of users to orkut(both good and bad) .

So I guess its time for you to scrap Dadi about today's dinner.

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