India's digital natives

Nearly 10% of the world's under-25 population live in India, and they "are shifting their career aspirations and social life to the digital world," India's Economic Times reports. The study, by Tata Consultancy Services, surveyed 14,000 high school students in 12 cities and found that over 93% of respondents "were aware of social networking sites and used it in some way in their daily life. Bangalore students are "leading the pack, as 66% of them said they were active on blogs and social networking sites, compared with 39% nationally." Nine percent of them use Second Life and MySpace and do podcasting. "Among social networking sites, [Google's] Orkut was most preferred, followed by Facebook, while Google continued to be the most preferred source of information." Careers that top their list are the ever-popular IT and engineering, but "other fields like travel and tourism, media & entertainment are emerging as professional choices." The US and UK are the top picks for overseas university study (40% want to go to the US), but Singapore and Dubai "are preferred by one in five students in Chennai and Cochin, respectively, as top choice for overseas education."

Will India switch to Facebook?

Facebook has serious designs on India, but "for years [Google's] Orkut has dominated the Indian social-networking scene," Business Week reports. Facebook added Hindi and five other Indian languages last month, bringing the total number of languages it supports to 57, "with several dozen more in the works." Some question why, though, since such a high percentage of India's Net-using population speak English, especially connected young urbanites. The real draw for Facebook, probably, is English-speaking friends overseas who already use Facebook. A New Delhi-based source told Business Week that none of her US friends use Orkut, so she had to join Facebook. On the other hand, globally, linguistic diversity and issues may not be the issue so much as differences in how digital media and technologies are used from country to country, an interesting piece in Ad Age suggests, also using India as an example.

Social networking growth in India

India has a population of 1.1 billion, out of which a mere 19 million people visited social network sites this past December, comScore reports. Still, social networking growth was significant last year: 51% overall. Google's Orkut, popular in Brazil, is No. 1 in India too, at 12.8 million visitors in December, an increase of 81% over the previous year. Facebook, at 4 million December visitors, is No. 2 (150% growth). Indigenous sites bharatstudent.com (88% growth) and ibibo.com were in 3rd and 5th places, respectively, but ibibo lost ground, traffic-wise, between Decembers 2007 and '08. In 4th place, San Francisco-based Hi5.com had the highest year-on-year growth at 182%. Meanwhile, the Times of India reports on the Internet as "a great social research tool."