Facebook has beaten competitors like Orkut and Yahoo! to become the top social networking

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site in India with 20.9 million visitors in July this year, according to research firm comScore.

India, which was one of the few countries where Orkut retained the top spot amongst social networking websites, now has more people logging on to Facebook.

Facebook.com has grabbed the number one ranking in the social networking category for the first time in July with 20.9 million visitors, up 179% versus year ago, comScore said in a statement.

Compared to this, Google’s social networking platform registered a growth of just 16% with 19.9 million visitors in July.

This was followed by BharatStudent with 4.4 million visitors (up 3%) and Twitter.com (3.3 million), while Yahoo! owned two of the top ten social networking sites: Yahoo! Pulse (3.5 million visitors) and Yahoo! Buzz (1.8 million visitors).

According to the report, more than 33 million Internet users (aged 15 and older) in India visited social networking sites in July.

With this, India now ranks as the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking, after the US, China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and the UK.

“The social networking phenomenon continues to gain steam worldwide, and India represents one of the fastest growing markets at the moment,” comScore executive vice president (Asia-Pacific) Will Hodgman said.

Though Facebook has tripled its audience in the past year to pace the growth for the category, several other social networking sites have posted their own sizeable gains, he added.

These numbers excludes access from Internet cafes or mobile phones and PDAs.