1. Do you think Facebook can become India’s leading social networking site? Why or why not? What else can Facebook do to ensure success?

2. How well do you think Google is handling the problem of censoring content on its international sites such as Orkut? How do you think its solutions of these problems affect its plans to keep ahead of Facebook?

India is the world’s largest democracy and, with 1.2 billion people, the second-most populous country (after China). It is considered a major growth Internet market, with a tradition of free speech, a growing middle class that is still discovering the Internet (only about 5 percent of the Indian population is online so far), and huge market opportunities for providers of Web search and advertising.

Orkut, owned by Google, has long been India’s most popular social networking site, growing 35 percent a year and averaging 15 to 16 million unique visitors a month. Facebook, its closest rival, was launched around the same time in 2004. Despite steady growth, Facebook has since been running a fairly distant second to Orkut, recently reaching 7.5 to 8.2 million visitors a month. But Facebook has been turning up the heat in the social networking wars, and in one recent month it gained 700,000 visitors. Orkut’s numbers dropped by 800,00 for the same month, the largest dip in a year. Many observers of India’s Internet scene believe these two statistics signal a leap forward for Facebook that may put it on track to soon surpass Google’s Orkut as India’s premier online social network.

In fact, Facebook grew its audience about 230 percent in one recent year. What accounts for its success? One factor is a special software tool the site is promoting to let new users easily import their friends from Orkut and other sites. The tool speeds the process of establishing a Facebook presence and was created especially for Orkut. Facebook is also available in a number of widely used Indian languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam. And Facebook hired away a top Google advertising executive and has been buying ads on Google’s India portal. Finally, a “lite” version of Facebook, designed for users in developing countries that have limited access to high-speed Internet connections, was also added recently.

Meanwhile, Google faces some potential problems in India that are common to many multinational and Internet companies. Fearing a backlash in the midst of emotional public mourning for an Indian official killed in a helicopter crash, it recently removed offensive comments posted about him on Orkut, along with the entire user group to which they were posted. Says one leading India civil liberties lawyer, “Communal tensions become largely an excuse for denial of civil liberties and denial of freedom of speech. It’s a very thin line that’s being tread.”

“In those gray areas it is really hard,” agrees Google’s deputy general counsel. Company policy is to review posted material that Orkut users have flagged. Anything that violates its global bans on child pornography and hate speech, or the laws of the country in which it is operating, is removed.