It is official – Facebook is the number one ranking, surpassing Google’s Orkut as the leading social networking site for the first time in July 2010 with 20.9 million visitors while Orkut had only 19.9 million. This was followed by BharatStudent and then Twitter.

If you were wondering to yourself, what is the big deal? I always hear about Facebook but seldom hear of Orkut.

Well, here’s the BIG deal: Since Orkut’s launch in 2004, it has been the prevalent social networking site in India and in Brazil, despite not taking off as well in other countries.

The project got covered in the news on The Straits Times 28 August, 2010 (Saturday) Home/Causes section. What a great way to end the module for us.

If you are not sure what happened, here’s what my group did for a fundraising project in July.

The first thing you get online, what is the thing you would do? Is it signing in to Facebook or Twitter to check for new notifications, get to your game to collect rewards, or clear your mailbox?

It is not surprising what activities make up the top three: social networking, online games and e-mail. Compared to last year, the usage of such platforms have increased significantly.

Globally, women make up nearly 46 percent of the web population – despite being the minority, it is interesting to note that they are dominating many aspects of the digital media landscape.

Trends are showing that women have caught up in the usage of internet ranging from activities like purchasing online, social networking, instant messaging (IM) and it appears that the online experience of women sway towards communicating and building relationships with others.

Tweet This article was first published on Penn Olson on 09.08.2010. What if one day you are thirsty and find a vending machine, thinking it would quench your thirst but only to find that there is only dirty water? Thought-provoking, of course. Very often, we tend to take clean water for granted. So much so we do not remember that there are people in other parts of the world who die of water-related diseases daily. [...]