STRATEGIC MARKETING

GROUP ASSIGNMENT

FACEBOOK V/S ORKUT

Submitted To   :- Submitted By:-Prof. Subodh Tagare Shubham Aneja 2014279

Smriti Aggarwal 2014282Sugandha Bathla 2014284Veer Berea 2014320Arafat Khan 2014335Lauriane Dlb 2014354

DAVID : Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but then, broadcasted it to other various colleges. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to it by American universities' students. As of August 2015, Facebook had more than 1.18 billion monthly active users.Facebook is the fastest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to reach a market cap of $250 billion. Its turnover has reached in 2014 12.466 billion of dollars. Facebook was initially incorporated as a Florida LLC. For the first few months after its launch in February 2004, the costs for the website operations for thefacebook.com were turned into a porn website by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. The website also ran a few advertisements to meet its operating costs.

After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Moreover, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and classify their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Facebook allow its users to interact, that makes a viral effect.

The platform is not only social, but also it provides virtual world that gives some value from the website. So, the CEO focuses on delivering something valuable to its users, which therefore created business value for advertisers to access a huge global audience on one platform.

GOLIATH : Whereas Orkut was a social networking site that allowed to connect friends of friends (create or manage their social networ). It was launched in January, 2004 by Büyükkökten Orkut, a Turkish student at Stanford Universit , who launched the website at the university before becoming a Google employee. Later, it was acquired by Google company.

Each member could become a fan of any of the friends in their list and could also evaluate whether their friend is "Trustworthy", "Cool", "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 and this is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Each user could also customize their profile preferences and could restrict information that appeared on their profile from their friends and/or others (not on the friends list). Another feature was that any member could add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them were informed only when both parties added each other to their "Crush List".

An Orkut user could also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video. With Orkut, we could chat and share files.. Similar to Facebook, users could also use a "like" button to share interests with friends.

Less known than its competitor Facebook, Orkut had announced 50 million users with a high proportion in Brazil (26.5 million or 53.5% of all users), followed by India, the United States and Iran. Less than 10 % of Orkut users were from other countries (December 2006).Google closed the website on September 30, 2014, because Google had clearly shifted its focus toward its other social network, Google+. Today, it will be impossible for newcomers to create a new Orkut account. Users could before transfer their datas from Orkut to Google+.

Market Share:

In 2009, with more than half of India’s 47 million online population active on social networking sites, a battle for increased market share had sparked a war between the top two social media portals. Facebook was second, but fast growing while Orkut was leading. According to data by ViziSense, a unit of Komli Media Pvt. Ltd, the number of unique users per month for Orkut dropped from 16.95 million in June to 14.7 million in August, while Facebook’s user base increased by one million during the same period, from 6.92 million to 7.92 million.Orkut’s market share had been falling continuously from 2009 because of Facebook’s presence in India. In September, 2014, Orkut finally shut down and focused on Google+Market share of Orkut and Facebook since Facebook’s birth in 2004.

Market Share of FACEBOOK and ORKUT

How facebook diffrentiated itself from orkut ?

Like Button: The like button was an extremely simple way of voting up a piece of content or photograph. There was no such feature in Orkut.

Notifications: The red dot mark on top for showing notifications makes the user revisit the website continuously and hence increases user interaction.

No Recent Visitors Feature: You can browse other people's profiles without worrying about them knowing it on Facebook. In case of Orkut, there was a feature of "Recent Visitors". It became too problematic for them as it prevented people from browsing other people's profiles and spending leisure time on the website.

News Feed: The news feed is so intelligently developed that it provides you with fresh content everytime. There was no substitute of it on orkut.

Personalised chat: Facebook had the feature of personalised chat keeping in mind the privacy of its users while aorkut had this feature of posts and chats on wall which was visible to all the users.

New Features like tagging friends, LIKE, SHARING!! which gives you a feeling that YES! Someone out there really "LIKE"(s), your posts

Integrated Applications Facebook put in various integrated applications to make it more user friendly such as games

Use of GIFs: The main reason behind the demise of MySpace was the evolution of web. Sparking graphics was a thing of mid and late 90s and better, sophistcated and simple design had to take over someday. Facebook was clean in that manner.

Privacy: No, not the current privacy policies of Facebook but when it was started, it was exclusive to Harvard. Slowly and slowly it spread to other universities. So it created a buzz around the people who were not on Facebook and they flocked in to curb their curiousity.Strategies used by Facebook to overtake the market of orkut

People Matter Most. It's people who build and run systems. The best tools for scaling are an engineering and operations teams that can handle anything.

Strategies adopted by FACEBOOK to overtake ORKUT

Scale Horizontally Handling exponentially growing traffic requires spreading load arbitrarily across many machines. Using different databases for tables like accounts and profiles only doubles capacity. This approach hurts efficiency, but efficiency is a separate effort from scaling, efficiency by itself doesn't substantially impact scaling.

Move Fast At every level of scale there are surprises. Surprises are quickly dealt with using a highly qualified cross disciplinary team that is flexible and skilled enough to deal with anything that comes up. Flexibility is more important than any individual technical decision. By moving fast Facebook is also able to try more options and figure out which ones work best.

Change Incrementally Making small changes and measuring the result is the key to moving fast. Big things are broken up into distinct parts, changes are not batched. Changes can be rolled out on a few machines to a few users. New systems can be built in parallel to old systems with traffic slowly moved over to the new system while results are being measured. Overall system stability is increased by incremental change because you know sooner if a particular strategy is working. It's easier to figure out where things go wrong when dealing with smaller increments.

Measure Everything Production is where the really useful data comes from. Measure both system and application level statistic to know what's happening. Checkout what's happening in the 95th or 99th percentile as averages hide important issues. Small, Independent Teams. Small teams allow work to be done efficiently, quickly, and carefully. Only three people work on photos, for example, the largest photo site on the internet.

Control and Responsibility Responsibility requires control. If a team is responsible for something they must control it. For example, Facebook pushes code into production everyday. The person who wrote the code is there to fix anything that goes wrong. If the responsibility of pushing and wring code are split, then the code writer doesn't feel the effect of code that breaks the system. Robert puts it wonderfully: The best way we know of to get great software to these 500 million people is to have a person who understands the importance of what they're doing make a good decision about something they understand and control.