Facebook may not be hard on the heels of Google yet but its spectacular growth is threatening to cast the internet search giant’s own networking site, Orkut, to the fringes of internet, at least in India.

The world’s second-most visited website after Google, which turned six on Friday, could surpass Orkut in the number of users to become India’s top social networking site by September, say a couple of studies. Though Orkut now has 15.5 million users compared to Facebook’s 10.4 million as of December, the Google site’s additions are at a sluggish 1.8% per month, says data from Mumbai-based Komli Ad Networks. Facebook, in contrast, is growing at a compounded 7.8% a month since July.

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They say ‘Whatever happens, happens for the best’. At least it fits Orkut’s claims of being clueless on how they managed to introduce their new chat option for everyone. The novel options offered by the popular networking site for chat should be a treat for users, reveals the official Orkut blog. With a host of new thrilling features coming their way, Orkut chatting is going to be much more fun.

Orkut chat’s new additional features include Chat pop out, Group chat and Chat list. Also, now chatting with multiple friends at the same time is possible with the mentioned features.

The first feature is dubbed as the Chat pop out. This feature allows users to individually view the chats. Also, separate windows can be used for the same. The second feature being the Group chat offers users to chat with several friends simultaneously. Now how cool is that? Finally, the Chat list feature gives a sneak peak to its users about the availability of their friends. It also updates them about how their friends are logged in. If they are online through Orkut, Gmail, iGoogle or Google talk.

Now chatting can be real fun via Orkut. Besides the company also plans to bring in some more super-cool features to chat in the near future. So hold on and stay tuned for all their forthcoming news.

Google’s social networking site Orkut seems to be growing briskly in India. In the past one year, the number of Orkut users has swelled to 17.1 million -- up by about 80 per cent. India now has 18 per cent share of the total number of Orkut users worldwide, bettered only by Brazil and the US .
“India has been exciting for us. The next phase of growth for us will come from tier-II and III cities here,” says Rahul Kulkarni, Google’s product manager (India). This growth in Orkut numbers is higher than internet growth in India, the company says. The Google Internet Bus is one such initiative that spreads awareness about the internet and social networking in rural areas.
“We have evolved our applications as well. It’s not only communities that are getting formed, but NGOs too are being put together on Orkut,” says Kulkarni, explaining the reasons behind Orkut’s growth in India. Kulkarni, however, stopped short of predicting how the growth rate will be for the next year.
The next trend in social networking, according to Google, will be interoperability of sites. “This could mean Facebook and Twitter users will be able to operate Orkut seamlessly,” says Kulkarni.