Orkut has what Facebook don’t

This is a quick comparison between Facebook and Orkut in one very limited aspect.

Something needs to be clear. I’m not saying Orkut is better than Facebook or vice versa, but where Facebook is lacking is that it is not a useful resource for information. Specially for technical information. Orkut on the other hand is a very good resource of information. It is being actively used by more technically orientated people, it seems! At least on the PHP side.

So here is what I did. I searched for the term “PHP” on both Facebook and Orkut. No surprise that Orkut’s search results is 10 time more accurate as it is a Google owned service! But hell… Surely with the budget Facebook’s got they could do better! I simply could not find the “main” PHP group in Facebook effectively, so I got to it through the PHP Cape Town group I belong to.

In Orkut, top result is the 1st prize I was looking for!

Below is a screenshot of the results Facebook gave me when I search for only “PHP”.

Here is what Orkut produced. Much, much more Google-accurate

I then decided I’l expand my search a bit for Facebook as who know, maybe PHP is a common phrase amongst Fookers. So I searched for the term “PHP Develop”.

A wee bit better results this time. At least the first five result were relevant with the top result featuring my favorite MVC framework! But low and behold, five results down and we’re back to some peculiar results…

This is the bottom half of the results:

Finally I found the PHP group I was looking for in Facebook. Only one problem is that it seems small and empty with only a couple of hundred members. The information provided in there is also a bit stale and useless. I should maybe try asking advice at a later stage and compare the helpfulness of the two platforms…

On the other side over at Orkut, the group is active! Very much so. In the forum section of the group there is almost more posts for today than there is in the whole of the Facebook PHP group! They got some interesting Polls running and it sports a nifty group of members amounting to more than 16 000 members at the time!

Here is some of the interesting polls…

At the time of the screenshot there was 16895 users. Quite significant!

All in all, for me personally as a developer I’ll be looking much more into Orkut than Facebook! Still I will not abandon Facebook at all! Lets face it, nothing beats Facebook at networking since almost everyone is there!

Not sure that this case study will be in everyone’s interest, but it might be well worth your while looking into it.

I’ve looked at Orkut previously, but got spammed too much for my liking so I stopped using it. That was a long time ago and it seems that they made some efforts combating the SPAMMERS!! Let’s hope…

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Tags: facebook, orkut, social-networking

6 Comments to "Orkut has what Facebook don’t"

• Charl van Niekerk said: On 09/02/2007 at 6:22 pm

  The only time I was honestly ever interested in Facebook was when I wrote the Muti Facebook hook script codenamed “facehook.py” and that was only from a technical perspective.

  I think that Facebook hasn’t really materialised as a geek meeting place. Most of Facebook does not seem to have much attraction value to geeks (I know it certainly does not to me) so hopefully Orkut will fill that void. I just registered this afternoon and am certainly going to keep using it, probably much more frequently than Facebook!

• FeistyFemale said: On 09/03/2007 at 2:01 pm

  LOL, Ah you guys are just way too geeky!!! Facebook is there to ad some entertainment and help you see the lighter side of life!!!

• Paul Jacobson said: On 09/04/2007 at 7:18 am

  I agree with you. I am not exactly ditching Facebook for Orkut right this minute. There is a lot going on in Facebook that Orkut doesn’t have. At the same time Orkut has huge potential and it could well be the next big social network if Google does some serious work on the service.

• eric haddad said: On 09/05/2007 at 7:35 am

  the reason why you got the results you did is because facebook’s sponsored groups are raking in about 50k a month for them, and every additional hit they get off of a querry increases the chances of the advertiser renewing. money baby, money!!!

• Stii said: On 09/06/2007 at 8:08 am

  Doesn’t that just SUCK, Eric?! Thanks, it makes a little more sense now! I thought the results was a little too crazy!

• BabeStud.com - Its New … Its Different » Google (Finally) Adds Orkut Privacy Settings To Scrapbook said: On 10/17/2007 at 12:03 pm

  [...] It looks as if Google also has drastically improved the search feature on Orkut, which may put Facebook to shame. Don’t you love a little competition? Content Copyright 2005-2007 of Inside Orkut. All [...]

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Filed in: Social Web, Web 2.0 by: Stii