The social networking initiative of Yahoo! named the "Yahoo! Pulse" has grown to become the forth largest social networking portal in India with 3.5 million unique users, according to research firm Comscore.

The Yahoo! Pulse was launched in June and touched the 3.5 million users mark in just two months. The company also went though re-branding to attract attention and increase the number of users and the now it might be beginning to reap its fruits.

Yahoo! India has two social networking sites among the top ten in the country with Yahoo! Pulse with 3.5 million and Yahoo! Buzz with 1.8 million visitors. The social networking sites in the country are recording growth in the country.

Data from Comscore also showed that Facebook has surpassed rival, Orkut which was leading in some countries including India, to reach the top position in the country.

Facebook recorded 20.9 million visitors in July when compared to 19.9 million visitors to the Google owned Orkut.

Micro blogging site, Twitter has grown 233 percent in the period. Overall the Internet users visiting social networking site grew 43 percent year-on-year. Meanwhile, Yahoo is the second largest internet property in India after Google. In over all rankings, Google recorded 37.6 million unique users, followed by Yahoo! with 28.9 million and Microsoft with 20.2 million.

Yahoo! India Managing Director Arun Tadanki expressed that the global re-branding initiative had an positive impact on the figures for Yahoo!.

"A lot of brand campaign is about connecting with people. There was a generation that grew with Yahoo and hence there was no need to make them familiar. But there are a lot of people who have now come to use the internet and need to know about us," said Tadanki.

About 33 million Indian Internet users logged on to social networking sites, which is about 84 per cent of the total Internet users in the country. India has emerged as the seventh largest social networking market after U. S., China, Germany, Russia, Brazil and the UK.