Date:04/02/2008 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2008/02/04/stories/2008020450371600.htm

Back Indians among world’s heaviest receivers of ‘scraps’

Indian women receive more scraps than men

Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi, Feb. 3 Short messaging on mobile phones as a fun way to communicate is now passe. Indians are finding that posting online scraps on pages such as Orkut, Facebook and MySpace is the way to be cool.

According to a new report from Orkut, Indian users are among the top five countries to get the maximum number of scraps posted on their Web pages.

Indian users on Orkut receive as many as 345 scraps on an average, which is quite impressive when compared to 423 scraps per user in the US. More than 16 per cent of members on Orkut are from India, which is the second largest community from a single country after Brazil.

The numbers put out recently on Orkut’s blog reveal that along with Indians, users in places such as Pakistan, Cayman Island, Brazil and Grenada — where the traditional forms of communication may not be fully in place — are the heaviest receivers of scraps.

Women score

While globally, women receive just under half (48 per cent) of all scraps, Indian women score a higher percentage than men. Women from the Cayman Islands receive the most, followed by those from the British Virgin Islands. Indian women members on Orkut got 443 scraps per user on an average compared to 301 scraps by the men.

While India-specific statistics for Facebook and MySpace could not be ascertained, unofficial numbers peg the membership at over a million on these two online social networking Web sites. According to one estimate, Facebook is the 26th most popular Web site in India.

Hi, Hello, Ok

Interestingly, the scraps are usually very brief. The most popular scrap according to Orkut’s research is ‘Hi’, which occurred 1,131 times out of a sample of 1 lakh short scraps. Short words such as ‘Ok’, ‘hello’, and ‘congratulations’ are the other most commonly used scraps.