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The number of Facebook users has been growing rapidly in Brazil, and in particular in India. Orkut is still the dominant social network, but the rate of growth is slowing. That said, the number of Orkut users is still millions ahead of Facebook or MySpace.

Orkut has more than 22 million users just in Brazil (according to statistics cited in a recent article in MediaPost, based on data from ComScore), while Facebook has just over 1 million, half of those added in 2009. Other sources suggest Orkut’s userbase in Brazil could be as high as 37 million. In India, Facebook has 3.2 million users and Orkut, 14.5 million.

Motives: Besides the novelty factor, which has led Brazilian Orkut-users and non-Orkut-users alike to adopt Facebook, the other motive which seems to be contributing to Facebook’s growth is the much more robust platform, which is more polished and attractive than Orkut’s.

Taking into account the application API and the portability of the social graph, developers see more and better possibilities with Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform, compared to Google Friend Connect and OpenSocial. This means, for example, that the social applications are much more integrated into the user experience on Facebook, rather than seeming like extra components.

Likely this usability on the part of Facebook was an important factor in the growth of the number of ad campaigns and forms of entertainment that rely on applications. That is, Facebook is very naturally and rapidly becoming a center for online experience for the user; a point of arrival and departure; an environment for integrating activities, based on friends, not on search algorithms.

Other networks: Taking off in the growth race is Twitter, a platform that is simple, basic, yet synthetic - its functions are the basis for the development of so many other web services now being created. According to comScore, Twitter was in fourth place in March 2009 (tied with Fotolog at 5%) among internet users in Brazil, just a percentage point below Sonico, which lags (quite far) behind MSN/Live and Orkut. That said, researchers in Rio de Janeiro estimate that, given the adoption of Twitter in national initiatives and a series of articles about it in print and on television, the power of Twitter has already climbed to 9%, taking third place among social networks with the most users.

The number of MySpace users in Brazil seems to be around 2.5 million, according to BillBoard, or even as high as 7 million, according to the executive director of MySpace in Brazil. Either way, it seems likely that the recent shutdown of MySpace’s local content production and advertising in Brazil will cool their growth.