Google's social networking service, Orkut which kicked off as just a 20 percent time project of Orkut Büyükkökten, its creator, has come to be known, as the world's most popular social networking site.

What started in 2004 as a mission to help users connect by building online communities of people who share interests and activities and organize information, today has gone to become one of the biggest social network giants in India. 17.06 percent of Orkut members are Indians, making us the second largest nation on its network.

According to the latest comscore estimates, in India, Orkut has reigned as the most visited social networking site in December 2008 with more than 12.8 million visitors, an increase of 81 percent from the previous year. Orkut has been facing stiff competition from Facebook in the recent past, where it managed to lose its share to the social networking site. But Orkut, which is known to follow one basic mantra of making the user, the owner, and deliver what he demands, managed to turn the table upside down, with its constant innovation and vision.

One of the key reasons for Orkut's success is a belief that good ideas can, and should, come from anywhere, be it the users themselves, and the stress is always on creating something new and innovative. Orkut's future rests on the creativity of their engineers and how they grasp and weave out the products around what the users want and would enjoy working with. In the Orkut universe a user defines and derives his own experience.

The constant feedback and encouragement from the users has enabled innovation and fueled passion at Orkut, to enhance the user's experience and social interaction at every step.

To begin with, Orkut has introduced a number of privacy features, giving users the right to decide on accessibility to individual profiles.

Then came the "Open Social", a set of applications that extended from games to programs to help you invite friends to a particular location that you marked on a map. What's more, 50 percent of these applications were created in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, and Bangalore for Indian users.

With dial-up connections still very slow in India, and the mobile infrastructure limited to 2G, Orkut responded with a low-bandwidth version and a mobile version, which could preserve the experience even at low speeds.

Making web more social

Now users can engage in long personal conversations, discussing their lives, taking advise, sitting miles apart without wasting any ISD charges using various Orkut applications, like Instant Messaging ask friend, where only your choice of users can have an access, exchanging pictures and videos simultaneously, thus adding a real life feel to the whole communication. The privacy features have enhanced the freedom with which users now express and communicate tremendously.

To cater to its Indian members, the site also introduced an application so users could use Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, to name a few) to manage their accounts.

Over a period of time Orkut once again saw that its audience graph go up three times the size of its nearest competitor in the category. Other social networks like Facebook.com which captured the #2 position with 4 million visitors, up 150 percent versus year ago, followed by local social networking site Bharatstudent.com with 3.3 million visitors (up 88 percent) and hi5.com with 2 million visitors (up 182 percent).

Social Networking sites have seen an increase of 51 percent from the previous year, to more than 19 million visitors in December 2008, as per by comscore estimates.